Anyone who uses Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat knows that the EU has lost the race to see who can use personal data commercially to the American Internet companies.

The planned new digital laws of the EU will hardly change anything about this.

It is all the more important for the European Commission that this does not happen again with the important industrial data.

After all, there is enormous potential in the data in view of the increasing networking of the economy (keyword Industry 4.0) and new offers such as autonomous driving.

In order to take advantage of this, the EU has to answer one question: how can it ensure that the rapidly growing amount of data generated by humans and machines alike does not lie around unused or is at most used by a few large corporations?

Henrik Kafsack

Business correspondent in Brussels.

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The answer is to be provided by a new data law ("Data Act"), which the Commission intends to present on February 23.

The FAZ has a draft.

The EU authority wants to prevent manufacturers of networked products, whether it's industrial plants, cars, language assistants or smartwatches, from hoarding the data generated by users and not sharing it with other companies.

To this end, she wants to oblige the manufacturers to make the data available to their users – private individuals and companies – free of charge on request.

But that's not all.

The users should also be able to pass on the data to third parties or authorize third parties to collect and use the data - even if then for a "reasonable" fee to the manufacturer.

The weights on the market are being shifted

Car companies, medium-sized companies and, last but not least, American Internet companies would be affected.

These now also play a major role in the market for connected products such as connected driving.

The car company Stellantis, to which Opel, Peugeot, Fiat and Chrysler belong, is cooperating with Amazon.

To prevent the internet giants from using the law to gain access to even more data, they are not allowed to access data from third parties themselves.

The law expressly excludes companies that fall under the new EU law for digital markets (DMA), i.e. above all Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.

So the American Internet giants have to share their data, but they themselves do not have access to the data of other European companies.

According to Brussels, if the Commission sticks to this approach, it would be a revolution and likely to meet with strong resistance from companies.

After all, the networked products would have to be designed in the future in such a way that the data can be passed on smoothly, which means a lot of work for the company.

The proposal expressly excludes unnecessarily complicated specifications and processes for retrieving the data.

In addition, the approach interferes with their business model because they can then no longer use the data exclusively - especially since the protection of business secrets should not prevent data transfer according to the draft.

The parties involved only have to ensure that these business secrets are adequately protected.

The weights on the market are being shifted.

Facilitate the change of cloud provider

However, there is an important limitation for the use of the data.

They may not be used to develop products that compete with those of the manufacturers from which the shared data originated.

Daimler could therefore not be forced to pass on data collected from its autonomously driving cars to BMW or VW if they then used the data to improve their own autonomously driving cars.

The Commission also wants to exempt small companies from the obligation to pass on data, at least as long as they are not economically dependent on other larger companies.

The law is also intended to make it easier for companies and private individuals to switch from one cloud provider to another.

According to the reasoning in the draft law, the self-commitment of the cloud providers to facilitate the change has not brought any dynamism to the market.

The Commission therefore wants to oblige cloud providers such as Amazon's AWS, Microsoft or Google to enable a technically and contractually smooth relocation of data, software and applications.

In addition, the providers should take all “reasonable technical, legal and organizational measures” to prevent non-EU countries from gaining access to non-personal data if this violates European or EU law.

In order for the data law to come into force,