A Data Act, but no Data Commons

On December 22, the Data Act was published in the Official Journal of the European Union. It subsequently came into force on January 11, and most of the provisions in the Act will apply from September 12, 2025. At Open Future, we have been following the development of the Data Act from the very beginning – in fact, it was the first policy file we followed throughout the legislative process.

Now that the Data Act has been adopted, it is time to take stock of the outcome of this process. Our main interest in the Data Act was related to our work on the Data Commons. From the very beginning, we identified the Data Act as a potential vector for building a Public Data Commons in the EU. This meant that our main focus was on what would become Chapter V of the Act, which deals with “making data available to public sector bodies, the Commission, the European Central Bank and Union bodies on the basis of an exceptional need”.

In our contributions to the process, we argued that an approach to business-to-government (B2G) data sharing based on a narrowly defined “exceptional need” was far too narrow and should be replaced by a broader framework for data sharing in the public interest – a European Public Data Commons. Despite our efforts to build support for such an approach, we were unable to achieve this goal, in part to the widespread data protection concerns among progressive lawmakers that we could not fully address. The end result is a Data Act that represents a missed opportunity to strengthen the capacity of public administration, civil society and researchers to drive data-driven policies for the public good.

With the adoption of the Data Act, the question of how to mobilize data for the public good remains largely unresolved. The European Union’s main non-legislative instrument for unlocking the potential of data – the Common European Data Spaces – has so far had a rather mixed track record with very limited real-world input, and it remains to be seen whether this approach will survive the transition to a new European Commission later this year.

Meanwhile, the hype around Generative AI systems shows an unprecedented demand for data. Here, the lack of publicly available quality data is one of the key bottlenecks to be addressed in order to develop alternative approaches to the models provided by Big Tech. All of this underscores the need for a Public Data Commons and other commons based approaches to data governance. With the passage of the Data Act, we will continue to explore this space to identify other ways to put these ideas into practice.