Keynote "Governance of platforms and the data economy"

3 September 2019

Ingrid Schneider will give this keynote at the EGOV2019, September 2-4, 2019 in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy. Read on for the abstract.

Abstract

In times of Big Data, Machine Learning and AI, data got substantial economic value. The European Commission, in the context of the EU’s digital single market strategy, has envisioned a contractual model of services in return for data (European Commission 2015; 2017; Metzger 2016). However, the legal categories and terms are far from clear and uncontentious (Wendehorst et al. 2017). Digital platforms have acquired substantial market values and make high turnover via ads. The business models of platform industries often include hidden practices of data aggregation used for rating, ranking and scoring, e.g. for finance and risk insurances, but also for political influence-seeking.

With regard to access and exclusion rights over data, questions of data ownership arise. These are strongly associated with power relations between users, providers and intermediaries. However, the central question as yet has remained unresolved: Who owns data? Can data be owned? And if so, who should be the legal owner? While some legal scholars advocate property rights on data, other – predominantly economic – scholars vehemently reject new intellectual property rights in data, as they assume that this would stifle innovation and be anti-competitive (Kerber, 2016). Moreover, there is intense discussion whether privacy, data protection, and personality rights are complementary to economic rights over data or colliding with such rights (Hoeren 2014).

I will argue from a political science perspective and will present some conceptual models for the governance of data economies. For conceptualising the tricky questions of access and disposition rights over data, various forms of product categories need to be classified, as well as private and collective use and compensation models be discerned. Thus, data may be conceptualised as private goods, as common goods and as public goods (see Heller 1998, Boyle 2003, Olson 1965, Ostrom 1990; Morozov 2014; 2018). Other proposals focus on a stewardship or fiduciary trust model for databases and data brokerage (Winickoff & Winickoff 2003). I will discuss the pros and cons of these models and will show that such categories are useful for a meta-level framework which accommodates the diversity of concerns, motives, interests, norms, and implications involved in the debate on data as an economic asset. These questions are closely linked to the development of governance and regulation models both in the EU and on a global scale.

 
Programme EGOV2019

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