Data Act: a European version of Data Nationalism?

Abstract

The Datafication of the society led to the progressive decrease of the EU sovereignty: data produced by European citizens and companies have been systematically exploited by better equipped and skilled foreign players, thus holding European industrial and technological development back. Some of the acts lately enacted in the EU aim to overturn this detrimental situation through the update of the flawed European data law. This paper focuses on the last of the European Regulation concerning data law, i.e. the Data Act, through which EU institutions seek to reallocate the value of data produced or processed by means of information and communication technologies. Notably, it is questionable whether the data flow legislation setup in EU can be deemed as a Data Nationalism policy and whether this act could be a profitable attempt to defend the European sovereignty.