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#DataSpaces

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@Migueldeicaza @davew,

For years, we’ve offered a personal #DataSpaces platform providing an abstraction layer over data managed by #filesystems (including cloud services) and/or #DBMS.

You can even mount #Dropbox, #OneDrive, #S3, etc., with fine-grained access controls for governance.

In the age of #AI, we’re making this usable via natural language as an extension (e.g., #CustomGPT) for #LLM-based chatbots like #ChatGPT.

"Openness, and Some of its Shades", a new blogpost by my colleague @jrglmn from the #MMK project of @stabi_berlin describing what #dataspaces and #datasovereignity mean to #GLAM institutions in the era of machine learning. He also mentions the #GaiaX based portal of @CrossAsia. This underlines my call to GLAMs to become a #FullStackDataProvider
mmk.sbb.berlin/2024/06/21/open
CC @cneud @deltadao

mmk.sbb.berlinOpenness, and Some of its Shades – Mensch.Maschine.Kultur

Forthcoming reports for the EU by two former Italian prime ministers, “Super” Mario Draghi [1] and Enrico Letta [2], are likely to be very influential on the next European Commission and Parliament. Here are some potentially far-reaching tech regulation-related comments they’ve made so far.

Former central banker, academic economist and Goldman Sachs employee Mario Draghi is focusing on industrial consolidation in defence, energy and telecommunications, and suggests “scale is also essential for developing new, innovative medicines, through the standardisation of the EU patients’ data, and the use of artificial intelligence, which needs all this wealth of data we have – if only they could be standardised.” [1] This is likely to supercharge the European Commission’s #DataSpaces project, including the just-agreed Health Data Space, and data strategy more broadly.

Draghi wants “a new common regulatory regime for start-ups in tech.” Watch out for sweeping exemptions from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), then later pressure to widen them to other businesses. We would also likely see a storm of lobbying against rules on “killer acquisitions”.

Draghi suggests the EU’s public High Performance Computing network “could be used by the private sector – for instance AI startups and SMEs – and in return, the financial benefits received could be reinvested to upgrade HPCs and support an EU cloud expansion.”

He appears to look admiringly at 🇺🇸/🇨🇳 oligopolies: “To produce more investment, we need to streamline and further harmonise telecoms regulations across Member States and support, not hamper, consolidation”, claiming “investment per capita is half of that in the US” (Prof. Tomasso Valletti responded the investment claim is “factually untrue”.)

Meanwhile, academic political scientist and career politician Enrico “Letta will use his report to argue that Brussels must use the next five years to pursue the integration of national markets for financial services, energy and telecoms. He will also call for EU merger rules to be changed to allow for more market consolidation.” [2]

Letta concludes his interview: US President “Trump 2 will be different from Trump 1… The single market of the beginning was for a small world, now we need a single market with teeth for a big world.” Let’s hope instead for Biden 2, (much) more open to cooperation with 🇪🇺 in his industrial strategy (the door is already ajar).

I hope civil society will be ready for this onslaught of “competitiveness” justifications for reducing antitrust enforcement and protections for individuals in the EU. Letta and Draghi are distinguished men, but let’s just say they come from one particular (centrist, technocratic, white Italian male 😉) perspective in the wide range of politics which has shaped the European Union since its creation.

The GDPR was agreed in very specific (Edward Snowden-boosted) circumstances, and was by then “the most lobbied law in EU history“. Re-opening it to a further storm of business and national security/law enforcement lobbying would potentially be a disaster for human rights, as positive as narrower strengthening (eg centralised Brussels enforcement against Big Tech, DMA-style) could be. Two factors might protect the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act: they were passed much more recently; and (at least so far) they have had a much bigger impact on non-European firms. The same can be said of the controversial “General-Purpose AI” rules in the AI Act.

That said: as Letta concludes, “The single market has long been plagued by national disregard for EU rules, haphazard enforcement, and resistance from capitals to centralising regulatory powers.” Ireland and Luxembourg’s approaches to GDPR enforcement could not illustrate this better (alongside the UK’s pre-Brexit). I wonder if the narrow, procedural GDPR harmonisation reform underway could be widened to include more centralised enforcement, perhaps by the European Data Protection Supervisor 🤔 without “clarifications” about the scope of national security/law enforcement exclusions (particularly on data retention and international data transfers).

https://www.ianbrown.tech/2024/04/17/1804/