 So, hello everyone officially and welcome to our event on how can openness find its place in the data act. My name is Paula Grzegorzewska and I am OFE Strategic Partnerships Director. So I'm very happy to have such a great panel of speakers with us today because they have quite different perspectives and quite different experiences that they can share with us on the influence, the challenges and the opportunities that the data act is posing or will pose in the future. So with us today we have Pierre Chastanet who is Head of Cloud and Software Unit at the European Commission and just a small asterisk here. Pierre will have to leave us at 5 p.m. sharp because of other commitments. So if you have questions to Pierre, please write them in the chat throughout the duration of the event till 5 p.m. Then we have with us Anita Shaw who is IP Law Counsel at IBM. We have Clark Parsons who is a Managing Director at the Internet Economy Foundation. Welcome Clark. We also have Frank Karliczek who is the CEO of NextCloud. And last but not least we have Astroneumelin Klerberg who is the Executive Director of OFE and will provide introductory remarks for this event. So for those who don't know us Open Forum Europe is a Brussels based think tank working at the intersection of open technologies and public policy but I assume that most of you know us. And first just a bit of housekeeping. Our events are meant to provide a space for an open exchange and you know to just have thought provoking ideas and discussions. So we will have a Q&A part of the session starting at 5. All our events are covered by our community participation guidelines that you can consult on our website and I will also drop the link in the chat. And as I said you can write your questions in the chat and some of them will be picked up during the Q&A section but our speakers also have access to the chat so you know they are able to see if there is anything that they would like to talk about or address while they speak. And as you see this event is recorded and the recording will be shared on our website and our social media and of course for those who couldn't make it today. As I mentioned we will start with introductory remarks by Astroneumelin and then move to the panel with our speakers and finalise with the Q&A session. So please Astroneumelin the floor is yours. Yes and let's hope that my sound works and everything that did like six tests but this should be good. Well thank you everyone for being here and extra special thank you for the panelists of course participating. So yeah just to contextualise a little bit from Oofy's perspective well obviously just a couple of weeks ago the reason why we're here today the data act was data act proposal was published from the European Commission and the goal in many ways of this file is to create fairness in the data economy by addressing the challenges of access and use of data in specific situations including B2B and B2G contexts. So as I said you know I said that this was the first Oofy event on this file that is because we of course expect there to be a few more as that the file progresses through the legislative process but then again you know seen from a different perspective first might also be kind of the wrong way of seeing it because of the events on the data economy and the cloud market for more than 10 years now and actually when preparing these remarks we took a moment and revisited the related events and projects we've organised or been part of over these 10 years and I think that some terms like the free flow of data directive and SWIPO might bring some of you back to these past efforts and things that you yourself have been engaged in. And the angle that Oofy has taken on the question of the data economy and has often been through the lens of the cloud market we have you know welcomed the emergence of this big massive global economy and also the move towards cloud solutions and in many ways important for Europe the setup can offer numerous advantages such as decreased costs, higher flexibility, efficiency, security and from our perspective something we talked a lot about is especially in a flexible hybrid cloud environments and it's true of the DNA of our think tank the recurrent focus in some ways kind of the red thread through these events and projects has been interoperability or perhaps the lack of cloud interoperability. So why interoperability? Well we see it on the one hand the lack of interoperability on the one hand as a barrier to cloud computing uptake because vendors fear vendor lock-in or users fear if you're a vendor lock-in but it's also an example of where network effects are at play with certain winner-take-all dynamics of the market and in our view lock-in it's interoperabilities and this is it leads to situations that once an organization has selected a cloud provider either it cannot move to to another provider or it will incur substantial costs in doing so. This is either because of economic or technical the economic or technical offers become inadequate or because the vendor has ceased operations this lack of interoperability creates rigidity in the market from the user perspective and from our view you know the common mechanism for enabling this interoperability is the use of open standards. This is as many of you probably know one of OFE's focus areas and it's close to our hearts and another important context for the data act and for today's event perhaps the most important aspect is that cloud infrastructure services are becoming the de facto operating systems of modern life and work. Increased market concentration in this field results in consumers businesses and public administrations ending up tied to expensive inflexible products that they cannot leave because their data is locked in but there are no serious alternatives. Technology in a network market always risks this market concentration and one when a vendor can leverage its advantage before the environment can adapt. So you know looking at the situation and the data act and where we're at today through the lens of history and what we've discussed for the past 10 years is that that a policy environment supports competition by leveraging interoperability and open standards has proven to be a decisive tool for public good and from this historical lens it was interesting just to go back and kind of see the questions we've discussed in the past. You know things I found was what can we learn from past technology driven market concentration? What policy options should policy makers consider should the European continue its course of self-regulation. Today we have the data act this will be interesting to touch on. Should the Commission consider focusing on setting incentives for competition or proposed legislation on interoperability? We'll get to this also with the data act it's quite interesting and I think it almost goes without saying that our activities at OFE and the discussions we've been part in have generally been responses to the focus of the European Commission and the Member States have had on the competitiveness of the Cloud Act. The data act is not just doesn't just didn't just pop up from somewhere there's been a lot of work on this in the past and it's you know we're excited to get into the new data acts especially now when revisiting all these past activities. This is a very important and interesting point in this history and our 10 years of engagement. So yeah we will now hear from our speakers and of course there is a big focus on interoperability in the new data act but there's a lot more to it as well. I don't want our past activities to kind of limit the scope of today's event in any way and that's why we're excited to have a panelist with a very different perspective on this file but I've already spoken too long and I've been dwelling on past activities so I hope the panelists and our moderator Paula can take us into the now and into the future and give us a deep dive into the data act and the role of openness in it. So thank you very much and thank you speakers and thanks everyone for joining. So thank you Astor and let's move to the panel part of the event and actually Astor talked quite a bit about our past activities. So it's a good switch to my first question to the first speaker because actually back in September 2019 we hosted an event on a competition in the cloud and we had both Pierre and Clark join us and Clark presented his reports that they wrote at the time. So I would like to hear your perspective Clark on the current problems in the cloud market and how do you think it has changed and how do you think it can change with the data act and what problem does it address. Super thank you Paula and also thanks to Astor and Paula and Julia for the invitation. It is a pleasure to be back with the Open Forum Europe. You guys do a wonderful job of putting these issues on the table and we're really delighted to be here again. Internet economy foundation for those who don't know we are a little think tank in Berlin working for Europe's digital future. We are in fact not funded by any of the giant companies that are often running around Brussels funding be cool. I just have to get that out there. So we really are fighting for the European ecosystem. I think it's important to say that upfront. You mentioned our study in 2019. We put out a study because if you could boil the Internet economy foundation down to one word it's usually competition. We really think that if Europe is going to succeed it can't just regulate its way to a world class tech ecosystem. It really has to compete and as a result we find ourselves looking to Brussels for a lot of these pieces of legislation like data act and digital markets act and others because we just think it's so important to get to get the rules of competition and engagement right. So in 2019 we did this study because we were looking at the growth of the cloud market the explosive growth of the cloud market continues to grow explosively and what we saw was something relatively scary and we really wanted to actually alert everybody to to market dominance that we saw was happening at the infrastructure layer. One of the things we did in our study that I think maybe is pertinent for those who didn't see it that I think is really helpful for everyone to give some terms of debate is we drew a pyramid and said all cloud is not the same. For the for the sake of debate and how we thought about the market we really wanted to try and draw some distinctions because not all cloud services are the same and so we drew three layers and we sort of said at the bottom of this pyramid is the infrastructure layer. This is the layer where if I had a start up 20 years ago and I was paying just for servers and engineers now I just you know hire Amazon web services or Google or many of the other providers at the at the infrastructure layer and that's completely taking care of it's it's a godsend for the startup ecosystem it cuts costs it raises efficiency it's fantastic. The problem we saw in 2019 was actually that Amazon web service who all the created that market were running away with it. It was really threatening to become an absolute monopoly at the time. I think those growth rates are rather those relationships have somewhat solidified they've not run away with the market there is still competition happy to see IBM still here with us on the market but Google and IBM and Microsoft and others have made investments in the tens of billions just to compete in that market. On top that is sitting of course what we said was the platform layer where there's a lot more providers it's more competitive you know we have great providers even from Europe I mean Frank Harlechek and NextCloud do a lot of these kind of services also on top of the infrastructure layer and and we see that as let's say not as threatened by monopolization if you will but still it's it's important to keep that distinction there's how important it is also in the platform level not to lock yourself in and then atop that we said was you know software layer software as a service which is massively competitive usually I mean most of us have a choice of tons of vendors for different softwares that's not often as much of a problem the one caveat we said and the point the reason we did this study was as many of us know in technology if you're a lower layer it's very easy to move up and eliminate your competition that was our that was our warning that if somebody dominated the infrastructure layer they could just move up the value chain and pretty soon eliminate all the platform competition and even some some software competition so that was the thrust of the study and and you know so our main recommendations were things like please governments be aware of the lock-in effect and and ensure that that that there's legislation and behavior in the marketplace that really does not let a monopolist take charge so I dare say years later what's changed Paula I think there's an awareness now of this and we've seen projects like Gaia X where Europe really has been trying to put kind of a federated system together of interoperability of openness of best of breed solutions you know being offering a lot of choice for for consumers and others but I mean if I could give one more thought before I turn it over I'd say you know as you said the goal of the act is to improve data sharing and create this data market and one of the things that the IEF has of course been very alarmist about is the fact that we have monopolies in some sectors of consumer data we have no really giant market dominant players it's the reason why we have a digital markets act hopefully taking shape it's also a reason why the DMA does include cloud computing services in its definition of core platform services so there's some overlap here we might find ourselves talking about several pieces of legislation but they all kind of work together or should work together we hope in that the digital markets act knows what the data act is doing and vice versa in terms of what we're trying to achieve because you know I think there's a lot of things that we've seen in the debate about how the digital markets act can can write some of these wrongs being very specific and not too generalist that we can really think about when we look at the data act and I think maybe get to some of that later but I think it's just really important you know Frank Carly check might remember just only about a half a year ago the German government after all of these warnings was about to essentially hire Microsoft Azure for a gigantic lock-in for much of the whole government and a lot of people had to scream and say are you kidding I mean it's the ultimate lock-in with a non-European player here so awareness is one thing but it hasn't necessarily trickled down to all the purchasing departments so I think you know unfortunately the market conditions that we were warning about in 2019 or to some degree still there but I think the awareness is there now based on these these legislations coming down the pike so I look forward to a good discussion and happy to go deeper on some of these issues okay thank you thank you Clark and actually I saw Pierre nodding quite a bit which is a good sign that we will jump to Pierre now because I would like to hear from your perspective you know Clark gave us a bit of a background you know how it looks and in the cloud services market and how do you see from your perspective you know what is the goal of the data act and will it be achieved you know in the in the framework of what Clark has just has just showed us okay many things Paula I do have great memories from from that way if he went with Clark at that time we could meet physically so great to be again sitting together albide virtually in a panel I would largely concur with what Clark has presented on the on the market situation just illustrating from from our perspective since 2017 and my data are a bit outdated we don't have yet the 2022 data but so between 2017 and 2020 the European cloud market has grown more than threefold so it shows the great development of cloud computing in Europe it's a very healthy market it's a very dynamic market and but our concern do remain as Clark pointed out with respect to competition issues as there is an increased concentration on the lower layer of the of the pyramid so infrastructure as a service platform as a service continue being dominated by a few large global actors and that result in of course the the European grown cloud service providers market share declining as a result so European providers at 26 percent of the of the market share in 2017 in 2020 there were only accounting for 16 percent of the Yasson pass market so Amazon Web Services Microsoft Azure Google cloud old in 2020 more than two-third of the of the European market and it's pretty symmetric in the in the rest of the world actually when we look at European provider they are the largest European provider which is the system accounts for just 2% of the of the European market and its nearest follower which is over age in France accounts for about 1% of of market so that's one is the situation on the on the supply side on the demand side we see a continuous improvement so European enterprises continue to move toward cloud technology as a key vehicle of their digital transformation the European Commission is very much promoting as this approach cloud is a key enabler for any organization public or private if they want to do AI blockchain cybersecurity big data analytics they must move into into the cloud they can also significantly reduce their capital expenditure costs by moving into into the cloud and this has paid off so in 2020 we had 36% of European enterprises using certain categories of cloud services in 2021 as that was up to 42% of of you enterprises still big discrepancies between large companies and smaller one but so some differences between some member state not to be Scandinavian countries that are much more advanced and more southern eastern member state where there is catch up to to be done so nevertheless it's it's progressing quite quite well in that respect so maybe making the linkage to the data act and as Clark mentioned the DMA let me also mention this shortly and we have a key concern on the degree of vertical integration of some of this large global service provider and unfortunately the pyramid does not have the layers are well defined unfortunately they are not distinct in the way providers are offering their services to the market and increasingly this is offered as a bundled offering Zerfer therefore cutting some providers out of the of the market when those providers are operating in just one layer of the pyramid so the degree of vertical integration is a key problem so of course we're going to try to address this via the DMA through the identification of gatekeepers that will be subject to specific and more stringent rules in that respect through the Digital Market Act so let me reassure you there in the first place this has been very well articulated that we had hours and hours of discussion internally to make sure there was a very clear carve out and the two of them really integrate like two pieces of a puzzle we made sure of this so no overlap really full complementarity between the DMA and the data act now with respect to concentration and market for EDT and we saw already in the free flow of non-personal data regulation we gave industry the opportunity to address the issue of vendor locking through self regulatory codes of conduct this unfortunately did not work out as well as we will have expected we could really see tensions crystallizing in industry around this issue of vendor locking and subsequently as the biggest problem arose on the software as a service we saw that interoperability aspect were a key problem undermining vendor locking so as we were trying to overcome some of this interoperability issue to foster data sharing data access data we use across the European economy to foster the good development of the European data economy this was a good opportunity to bundle a number of requirements pertaining to cloud switching as well as interoperability and standard so you can see that in the data act we're really trying to improve trust in data processing services and improve their performance their fluidity for users of any sector of the of the European economy so we have put in place a number of minimum requirement in the data act to ensure easier switching between providers of data processing services and increase interoperability by facilitating by identifying and where needed facilitating the development of common specifications common open technical specification or harmonized standard to facilitate this interoperability I think we will have a chance to come back Thank you and again I think that this leads us very well to our next speakers because they're actually both in the industry and quite quite different organizations but you know you talked about both the supply and the demand part of the side of the market and of course it's very important how the companies themselves react to this and of course how it influenced the influencers the users so let's jump let's jump to Anita and what is your experience with you know these changes that have been happening and what challenges and opportunities you see you know from your professional and perspective on you know how it can how it can change and you know what will be the challenge sure so again thanks for having me everyone it's great to be here with with key stakeholders and having these discussions so early on and good to hear it's going to continue I would say you know I think Clark and Pierre have described the the market very well I would also point to you to other sources of information such as Gartner run some really great annual surveys across technical fields including cloud I can talk a little bit about IBM and our current strategy to give you a picture as to where we are a few points to relay Paula one is that we are enterprise facing so our customers are at that enterprise level and pretty early on we made a commitment to our customers so IBM's customers own their data and have control over it the second point I want to make and I think asked a very briefly mentioned it is hybrid cloud moving forward and today that is IBM's approach it basically means that we can provide technology services to our customers regardless of the particular deployment or operational model in place so it could be you know private cloud or public cloud on-prem or or some combination of them all as well as hybrid we also offer a multi cloud approach so giving our customers the choice to pick between cloud vendors so at our broadest level strategy we are already offering portability switching and interoperability and giving our customers that full freedom of choice when it comes to implementing their cloud strategies okay so as well as being enterprise facing and having a hybrid and multi cloud approach I also want to link into the theme of today and openness so Paula in terms of IBM's offerings and services across many technical fields but also in cloud we do leverage open technology such as open-source software so a long-standing supporter but also contributor and member of open-source communities so probably more than two decades of work at foundations such as Eclipse Linux and Apache which continues today and for those of you who've been following us I think that was cemented you know a few years ago with our acquisition of Red Hat so Red Hat also enterprise facing but wholly an open-source software company and I think that really gave us you know the collaboration you know being able to leverage technology and services but also deploy our talent right in order to be able to provide customers that choice as well as open-source interestingly I think tangentially to the EU data act we've also been involved in the open data communities so some early work that we did with the Linux Foundation which continues today around creating a set or suite of open data agreements trying to address the practical mechanisms and barriers to entry when it comes to data access and sharing and hopefully we can get on to that a little bit later today and the fourth point I want to make is that in terms of at the policy level but also the technical and business level we have been involved in a number of work streams in the EU that preceded the data act I think Swipo has been mentioned some of the projects such as Gaia X and also related work streams such as the EU Cloud Code of Conduct which brought in GDPR and so hopefully you know that gives you a high-level view of not only our history but where we are today and I will say in terms of some of the themes that Pierre already mentioned with the data act we are very much aligned when it comes to data access and sharing and really trying to unlock value in data but also the underlying principles that seem to run through the acts around trust transparency and openness so glad to be part of this discussion and hope it continues. Thank you and actually if you had to point to one challenge that you see in implementing the data act you know for you know not only for IBM but you know for companies that will have to you know just show the rules in place what would you say it is? I would say that the data act it's great it covers many topics but it is quite broad so as these discussions play out and as the process moves through I would love to see deeper discussions around some of the provisions with our technical and business leaders at the table so that they can see how it's going to implement them at a practical on the ground level so I don't know if the audience knows my background I'm actually an attorney ex software developer but very much advocating for my clients today internally in terms of the technical and business teams you know how is this going to play out a few initial questions I have after reading the draft regulation there are many actors mentioned data holders data recipients but also in terms of cloud GDPR there are other entities such as data processors data controllers it would be good to continue these discussions to understand roles and responsibilities and how those entities intersect and interact I think data itself is a very interesting topic in my mind there isn't really a single definition of data data isn't all equal and by that I mean in terms of sensitivity but even the technical structure and format so again it would be great to maybe you know as a team pass through some examples as this plays out as to how the provisions will impact the various data types and by that I mean you know business versus consumer data personal versus non personal and just the many types of data that we deal with raw versus processed versus metadata and I think this is where you know the legal and policy makers we really need your help Clark and Frank you know we need our technical and business teams around that table so that we can really start to pass this as a team okay thank you and as you as you mentioned Frank let's let's jump to Frank you know continuing on the on the more industrial perspective here it's a bit more on the open source SME perspective and we're very happy to to work with next code and have you here today so yeah in your experience and then you're in your view what changes could happen and you know like just how it could impact your business and businesses that are similar to yours or maybe on the other side of the spectrum as well yeah thanks a lot I'm also very happy to be here to participate in this but in this fascinating discussion I think it's a it's really important because it can hopefully has a big impact on on the future of Europe and the rest of the world so first a little bit about next cloud so maybe it's helpful to talk a little bit about what we are doing and to clarify things because when I picked the name next cloud I think I did a mistake because we actually are not cloud we are actually a software company that that provides software to our users and customers so they can they can build up a cloud infrastructure for collaborating and communicating and sharing and handling of data the reason for that is of course that our mission is to create like an ecosystem and federated distributed landscape of cloud infrastructure basically we're trying to fight the monopolies like the central gatekeepers from the big cloud companies from China and the US and so on by giving like powerful software to everybody and they can then run it after once and how they want and then handling them of course because that's obviously connected handling that data in a way they want and they decide and that's compliant to do whatever they do with it our users are really from very tiny to very big it really goes from someone has a raspberry pi at home and decides to have a cloud for their family to share the photos and have a shared calendar and something like that up to like huge service providers I mean there's a German telecom OVH was mentioned already several others who use our software to provide cloud infrastructure we also deeply involved in the GaiaX project which was mentioned already guys of course also have a very similar mission this is why we are happy to be one of the founding members and we also provide official collaboration platform for GaiaX because GaiaX also has the mission to create a better decentralized federated cloud market especially Europe which I think is very important I it's still we still have to see how successful GaiaX will be there's still a lot of challenges somewhere and I mentioned in the chat already but it's definitely a good a good try basically a good yeah test what we can do in Europe to to shape this market another thing that's really important the next law that is open source was also mentioned and that you support open standards that's really important because everybody wants to look inside the software to make sure that they're not backdoors to make sure it is compliant that really does what they want wanted to do open standards are important for data exchange I think we come back to this later that's obviously absolutely important here related to the cloud act because we want to avoid vendor logins because the cloud act only can have a positive impact if people are actually able to move data around and do what I want and share it and analyze it and so on and it only works if you have open standards and open APIs and it's also something something we do and yeah last but not least the question from you where of course where do we see the connection to the cloud act to what we do it's actually fascinating I came across this old principle lately again from the hacker ethics it's also like one of the principle of the of the ccc is well known organization at least in Germany and they're basically postulated 1984 already like a long time ago already postulated that make public data available protect private data and I think this is a really important principle in German it's also sounds even a bit more catchy öffentliche daten nutzen private datenschützen and I think this is a really important principle because if you talk about data it's often mixed together it's really mixed around and I think it's very important to have this distinction between public data maybe information it comes from a government or for public organizations there should be available as much as possible everybody should be able to do with them as they want because that's the key message of the cloud act because it's yeah can boost innovation and it can beneficial for all of us but it's totally different than private data I'm obviously a big fan of the gbpr which protects my private data and this is a distinction that is is really important thank you it's actually quite interesting that most of you you know mentioned quite some distinctions that have to be made you know there are different types of the cloud there are different types of the data there are also different type of types of industries that are going to be impacted in different types of companies so I think this is very interesting to to keep in mind thank you frank for this and actually we got as Gaia X was mentioned a couple of times there was a question in the chat from jennathan sage to Clark and the question is you know that the main platforms are at the heart of the Gaia X and frank if you want to jump in also feel free so like is Gaia X really creating a more competitive marketplace at the cloud infrastructure layer if all of those main platforms are in there that's a good question paul and actually I tip my hat to alacia who just below in the chat actually took a good swipe at answering the question and I would actually say I kind of agree with alacia I mean I think in the beginning when people heard about that I asked they thought okay here comes the European Airbus of the cloud or something and then and so some people declared it dead once the main hyperscalers that weren't European wanted to get involved as they should want to but I think you know if we've now found a golden mean of saying this is a set of standards for federated cloud infrastructure to sort of ensure openness and interoperability because we sort of get together and agree on the way all of these systems should work together if that's all we can achieve that's a lot I mean I think that's a that's a really great way to try and you know if the problem is the lock-in then this is a great way to potentially ensure less of it so I think in that regard and I've sat in a lot of these working group calls with Gaiax subcommittees and stuff working on you know really tiny corners of the Gaiax project like AI for the financial fintech world I mean there's amazing amount of energy coming from a lot of players that are involved so I really I would I would be remit I would not want to write it off right now as as sort of something that's gone awry or failed I think we're just still trying to we're all kind of trying to find that sweet spot of what its role can be but I think we've kind of started to find that I'm curious to hear Frank's thoughts on that too yeah very similar very similar I mean the approach is of course very good there was a beginning that's exactly as you said this idea that it is AI Airbus or Cloud Airbus at the end the decision was made to not create like a central entity like Airbus but basically have this as a federated system where all cloud providers and in Europe can build like a virtual hyper scalar basically and I think this is the right approach this is really good of course the the economic sites are really interesting here to analyze because the vision is that a company who wants to use some cloud services then can access this rich marketplace where they can pick and choose and different services maybe they want to have some storage services some compute services and AI services and they can pick it from different guy X providers they can compare them they're all interchangeable they can also move like from one service provider to another because they all use the same standards the same APIs so this is the idea but if this really happens I hope so this is still up in the air because there's so many things to to consider because I mean if this cloud providers and I include the hyperscalers here if they would have loved to have open APIs and open standards and make the data free flow between them they would have implemented on their own right there's not this is not a brilliant idea where the government needs to come in say hey why don't you make an open please don't open standard and say oh that's a good idea never thought about that let's do it that's not how it is there are reasons there are reasons why there is a vandalog in I don't know there are reasons why they exist and that are in the business interest of some big players and I think what's needed is actually then a big push from Europe to overcome that and maybe this involves some some legislation force open standards on them okay thank you that's that's a very very interesting point and of course you know we will see in the upcoming years you know how the uptake works and of course what is the the final version and I think that this leads us straight to Pierre you know as you are on the on the institutional side of all this and of course you know we know that companies would have came up with the idea to share the data but you know they need a little bit of a push so like if you can maybe tell us a bit more how you see you know because interoperability is one of the key requirements and key goals you know that we are basically discussing right now and and that is in the data act and so our open standards that Frank has has mentioned and the data act proposal speaks of open API APIs in this context and not open standards so could you could you maybe tell us a bit more on the on the difference and you know why the the commission sees open APIs as the key for interoperability in this case okay yeah that's a that's a very good question so a nice transition towards what Frank was was just saying because this is exactly what we're forcing in terms of mandatory provision in the in the data act to facilitate interoperability so the the reason we didn't use the word often open standard very frankly this was throughout the draft that we prepared in the in the first place and then it was decided to take away that the terminology because it was carrying too much history I think for those people who have been working on on stylization issues for quite a number of years they may recall long and difficult debates around that terminology of open of open standard this is why we decided to to retain a different terminology but what matters is the effect that is expected from from this so we're really considering two different things we can have open technical specification fostering interoperability but the commission will use the the stylization regulatory framework to identify whether those open interoperability specification have been developed in an open inclusive transparent manner that will be a key assessment criteria for the commission to consider whether those open specific technical specification can be included in the in the commission repository so from this perspective we're going to be monitoring where we are already but we will continue monitoring very closely the emergence of a consensus building under GAIAX we have no intention whatsoever to duplicate the very good work that is being done under GAIAX already and we'll be happy to to take it up if it succeeds in its endeavor we will resume to calling for stylization mandate only in those cases where there is a very clear gap where we see that interoperability specification have not been addressed by industry or that the industry is so fragmented in its approach that it requires a more heavy-ended approach in which case we will call for proper for harmonized standard but in the very first place where what we will do is to to make a landscape analysis look at what exists out there not reinvent the wheel and as much as possible rely on consensus building from from industry this is why we are forcing the the two mechanisms you know so article 29 of data act have a look if you haven't done so yet thank you okay thank you um and yeah you said that you would do the the landscape analysis and which actually I had a quick exchange on this with Clark that you know the the whole idea of data sharing and you know that you know is the main goal of the data act and and interoperability is going to allow many companies to innovate and you know just create new services and new products on top of existing products thanks to the data that has been shared so I was wondering maybe with Clark first and then Anita if you if you have ideas on this what are the most interesting verticals or just industries or you know potential products and services that might arise or emerge thanks to the increased data sharing I mean the example that I think is usually brought up is the automotive industry because currently many car manufacturers you know they are sort of holding up to their data and as we know the cars are we even we had an event back at some point at OFE about the automotive industry and open source you know cars are becoming more and more computers on wheels so of course we might see a pretty nice emergence of new services or new products that are built on top of this data Clark do you have any you know any ideas on on the verticals or the industries that we should look for thanks Paula that's a great question um actually to me you know Europe doesn't celebrate one of its great success stories recently in this kind of realm which is PSD2 the fact that in the financial world we forced open you know we pride open really crusty old markets there by making it possible for consumers totally consent based to let neo banks have access to a lot of their key banking data and suddenly look at this you're leading the world and in so many fintechs and has so many unicorns now creating fabulous new products and services so I think Europe really shows that it when it when it has the guts to lead it can really literally create whole new markets so I think there's there's so much potential here it's really exciting to add to what you said Paula I'd say cars is interesting yes mobility I mean most people say Europe has really two gigantic treasure chests of data that are kind of public related that that we can tap and one is indeed mobility because Europe is just such a gigantic continent of public transit systems auto bonds trains I mean nowhere on earth is there's so much mobility on top of each other intermodal and it goes way beyond just google maps you know giving you real-time data based on what other people's phones are doing so I think mobility indeed one I would maybe say that's really exciting is health it's where Europe is also gigantic with all of its public health systems it's probably going to be the most difficult as Frank probably will laugh or cry when when we remember the German health card you were supposed to get a few years ago which essentially crashed and burned before it came out because of people worried about data protection so we're back to what Anita mentioned you know there's there's data and data there's public data there's private data COVID you know we all saw the incredible value of anonymized non-personal public health data to be used literally to steer the government for a couple of years now so Germany is really a forward player right now with its digital health apps I know that a lot of Europe is starting to look at this model and try to even start copying it so I think if I could throw one vertical out there for discussion I would say health is really exciting it's again it's a very tricky one because my personal health data is you know something I might not even want your insurer to see I mean it can get really personal and can really affect your whether you have a job or get a job or etc so it can be really super invasive if your personal health data gets out there you don't want it on the other hand the amount of public good that can be done with anonymized public health data for cancer research for incredible amounts of AI that you could stick on top of data sets it's mind boggling so I would really I hope that that's a vertical that you know in two to three years Pierre is being celebrated as one of the fathers of this great data act that's unlocked an incredible amount of innovation and new unicorns in AI atop the health industry okay I see that and unmuted I guess you have something to add on this yeah just to pick up on some of the the themes that Clark mentioned we are involved in a number of sectors including automotive and as we've been mentioning Gaia X I need to also mention Catena X which is a related project in the automotive sector and I would have to absolutely say artificial intelligence you know in terms of of needing to be able to use data and add value on top of it in terms of our offerings and solutions that's very critical for IBM I would again as the attorney point to some of the related work streams in the EU that is also looking at unlocking data for example the copyright directive you know having the the means to be able to have commercial text and data mining for the first time across Europe I think that's really going to help to remain competitive with other jurisdictions where some of those copyright laws are a little bit more flexible and I think that's great to see for any company regardless of size so yeah lots to watch I think in this place Paula. Thank you Frank Pierre Pierre I know that you have four minutes left so you know if you have something on the verticals because I mean I think it's just quite interesting because this is you know something that you know we might actually see even on the you know more consumer part of the of the spectrum so like do you see any verticals that that you would see as the most interesting because actually yeah I mean health mentioned by Clark I mean this is for sure the space to look for you see very often when the commission adopts a legislative proposal people only look at the at the main legislative act I will really recommend that you look at the staff working document which accompanied the the data act legislative proposal there is a dedicated staff working document on common european data spaces read the document you will understand the commission's intention and priorities in terms of data spaces. Okay thank you and I'd have to drop out so many thanks for the invitation many thanks for the great discussion I'm sure we'll have many other opportunities to pursue the discussion with OFE and its constituency. Yeah thank you thank you Pierre for joining us today it was it was very interesting and as Pierre is slowly slowly dropping out I was wondering if you because of course legislation process is not following you know a wish list from especially from industry or from the SMEs but of course tries to you know just make the the market and the ecosystem a bit more a bit better to innovate in and work in and if you had one wish or recommendation for the act that you haven't seen there is there something that you know you would like to see I see Anita nodding so maybe we start with you. Sure so again as the attorney on the call guys I have to bring this back to my sphere. We've talked a lot about openness today which again hopefully with my explanation of our history and strategy you can see that in terms of technology and services and open standards and open source we're very much aligned I would love to continue to have discussions though on the legal side of this the legal instruments that will come into play as we implement so for example some of the provisions in the data act around model contracts when it comes to data sharing in certain scenarios I think that's really positive I mean one thing we would say is that a barrier that we are seeing to data access and sharing or even software access and sharing at the broader level it is the proliferation of licenses and agreements that are out there I think that's you know we as a legal team could look to the open source communities the open data communities who've also had to cope with that proliferation get a technical business you know legal stakeholders together in the drafting very open in the drafting eliciting feedback as well in order to issue you know standardize the trend to be to be short terms and conditions licenses and agreements that can be easily read and consumed because as well as attorneys having to look at it you know Clark Frank our technical and business leaders are going to have to understand those instruments and comply so that's one wish I have as we continue these discussions could we bring the theme of openness into some of the other provisions as well thank you it's actually yeah you mentioned you know the proliferation of all the different legal documents and you know model contracts and all of this so I'm also quite interested in you know if actually all of you you know if you if you want to you can just unmute so we can have a bit more of a free flowing discussion at this point but you know if there will be challenges with this because you know of course the data act has you know quite some noble provisions let's put it as such but it might pose some issues especially to smaller companies I know that there are some there are some exceptions for SMEs but you know like we will see quite quite a bit happening and quite quite a quite a labyrinth to you know navigate and do you see that as as a challenge maybe Frank actually but I don't you know you're quite an open company as such so you know quite quite some of these things are already in the in the making or you know in the processes that you have yeah no I think that's that's really interesting I think that we also should a little bit look look more into practicality especially for smaller organizations and even like individuals normal citizens how to participate here um because data is one thing I mean I'm repeating myself what we discussed but data is one thing but you also need to have a way to actually access it and do something useful with it there's some kind of data where it's quite quite obvious I mean we discussed earlier about I don't know video recordings of self-driving cars that are needed to do like some AI machine learning thing to to train other cars when there's such as videos they're probably available in normal codex and all the standards but there are a lot of other data where it's totally not really totally unclear what to do with it how to access it what application you even need what processing power you need to do something useful with it and then it's theoretically available but in reality not available for for the small and medium companies or even home users you of course then would think that how does a home user or normal citizen care I mean what would they do with data but that's not really the case there's so many examples also in the open data space where once governments release data about I don't know something I mean in Germany for example once the german train system once they release like data about train connections and stuff like that then there was so much creativity a whole market you could say hoped up which used this data in interesting ways and connected it with other people and often this is done by like one or two like developers like students or something there's so much creativity that can be that can be unlocked with that but for that is really important that like everybody has a chance to participate here that you don't have to be a huge organization which with its own legal department to look into contracts to access some data or that you need to have huge budgets to actually buy software which is able to process data so yeah I really think we should look into the practicality of that and again sorry to say but open standards and open source is a key for that if I could if I could echo Frank on the word practicality I have maybe two headline word wishes for those writing the act right now to add to your wish list Paola I mean this is not the first time that Europe has gotten together very recently to draft a gigantic all-encompassing piece of let's say tech regulation and we've now lived with GDPR for several years it would be kind of crazy not to have learned from some of the let's say the mistakes or elements that we're not happy with of GDPR so if I could throw the two words out one it's just literally easy and understandable I mean whether it's for the consumer or for enterprise users I still don't know if people you know consumers just come on we all visit a website and we just click click click click right now it's proven to be a pretty crazy and hard to understand piece of legislation especially as Frank points out for the SMEs pity the poor startup trying to be GDPR wanting to be GDPR compliant but having to go out and hire a lawyer to try and figure out how to do it instead of focusing on building their business and the other one of courses we've seen cough cough Ireland the word enforcement you know if we get a data act that somehow ends up being balkanized in the way it's interpreted or enforced or how it's applied so that we end up with sort of 27 data acts then we also have a problem I mean we're trying to harmonize here we're trying to get a single digital market I would hope we would figure out that the way that the you know the data act you know well the digital markets act but also that the way the data act is interpreted that we sort of you know get it right this time and make sure that we're completely harmonized and that we that we know what we're doing in terms of the way it's going to be as the Germans will say oh gazette so it's going to be applied so those are my little elements those are more practical elements for the wish list but I think they're going to be super decisive in two to three years after the legislation's passed when we look back and say how are we living with this thing yeah it's interesting that you talk about the harmonization because actually you know we had one comment in the chat asking about the AI act which I think is for digital policy is quite separate from the data act which happens rarely because you know you said that you know if the data act or like its provisions and the scope would be put into separate 27 I think you said files a part of it is already true actually when I think about it you know because I mean all of these pieces of the digital landscape are just you know like overflowing each other and you know like they all interact with each other so I sort of see it as a challenge as well with the data act I just heard you you know I didn't know if you want to add something to this no not really I mean I just picking up on one franken and clark is saying again you know thinking of the folks who were at that coalface and implementing this from a business and technical viewpoint it does look like at a regulation level one of the wish list from the EU commission is to have harmonization of course the member states and that absolutely helps the company regardless of size where your HQ's you know leading that consistency as we we roll out business plans is really key and completely agree with franken clark he was even as an attorney you know some of these pieces of legislation are difficult to comprehend and especially as part of that bigger picture but I think this is a really good forum this and others in order to have those direct conversations with the lawmakers absolutely back frank up to say if you're in the audience and you have some views you know make sure you're looking out for when you can raise your hand I believe there were public consultation certainly IBM responded to on the EU data act you know ongoing conversations on some of the other puzzles in the picture so use your voice for sure yeah yeah that's a very good point you know to have different stakeholders in the conversation but actually I'm wondering you know because we all agree that you know it should be pretty easy and understandable to the different players you know to use this and to actually you know get the benefits out of it and do you have any ideas on how to make it more easy and understandable is it just you know having the the legal text you know like to be as clear as possible or is it some complementary measures because you know in different pieces of legislation we saw you know it depends if there is I don't know a board or you know if there are some companies that are leading the way in implementation any ideas on this I mean I could take just maybe one example let's just if the whole point here is not is to avoid the lock in and to let you port your data or switch providers then let's look at just that simple case and when I write you know if I want to right now change my search engine based on who is providing me with my browser you know let's look at how many times I have to say yes I really really really want to switch and I'm really sure I want to switch and a day after I've switched yes I'm still sure with my choice I don't want to go back so think about all the things just in the consumer space all the sort of crazy hurdles and tricks you see when you want to just switch a pretty simple service you know please just move all of my browsing history over here I'm ready for a new provider so I mean let's just look at that one case and let's say okay let's set the goal that in five years if somebody wants to move to next cloud from a similar provider is it 43 clicks is it a lot of nudges to come back is it a lot of are you really sure you want to do this how simple is it I mean you know it's gonna every provider is going to have a different answer and say well of course you know I don't want you to accidentally move your entire enterprise to another thing with one wrong click so but I mean I think we're gonna we're gonna have to really just look at that in a few years and see like is it possible to migrate without six months and hiring Accenture or you know can I really do this how simple is this going to be because that's the asset test I mean we have this golden ideal of competition is one click away but as we all know with you know with with google and search competition is one click and 27 billion away that's how much is annually spent to lock you in to google search based on what they pay to the browsers and others so so that's to me the test is can we just take one simple use case I want to switch providers and can we come back in three years after the data act is passed and say can you and any without you know without a nightmare that's going to be a really simple test and we ought to try and devise some kind of set of things like that just very simple moves to you know to really live interoperability here and let's see if you really can do it in a few years yeah I think this is an excellent point I completely agree with Claude we need to make sure that it's really practical and easy exactly without a hiring Accenture and have a billion euro project and of course you could theoretically but no one really can do it in reality I think this is exactly a great point I mean we we all should remember like one of the sounds silly but it's one of the great success stories of the European Union system the enforcement of the portability of like phone numbers one carrier to another and this sounds like from a technical and legal perspective like as a tiny thing but for citizens it's huge right and then we really should look into into some real-world examples what we can do here is a pain that a lot of people organizations companies have and regarding portability and excess of data and that we can solve it and that's what theoretically with hiring Accenture I love that example but really like really easily no harm to Accenture here by the way I just just sprung to mine but you all everybody knows exactly what we what I mean when you say that you know it's like do I can I do it with 10 clicks and and my CTO gets it done or is this going to be a project yeah and I would just add to that polar that we shouldn't lose the good work that we've done it was great to see PR saying that they're going to continue to monitor you know projects such as Gaia X but also industry-led initiatives such as Swipo you know let's look to those broader work streams as this process plays out and engage those stakeholders as needed so that we're not reinventing the wheel on some of this but I think yeah education and awareness for us all would be good maybe we could collaborate on more of that I think that would be really helpful as this plays out and sorry go on Clark I was just going to throw a question to Anita because I'm so fascinated you know IBM you guys you know there's a great book called the big nine that essentially says there's only nine companies right now in the world that are going to be capable of sort of being a part of the AI market and IBM is one of the six from the US and so I'm really fascinated you know AI runs on data and many of the competitors that are among those big nine are gigantic consumer companies right they're sitting on top of gigantic amounts of consumer data that they've gathered from our mobile phones and other things and you guys are of course at the enterprise level but yeah is there you know we're talking you know even the data act is going to be separating devices and data I'm just curious to do a different separation here and let's talk about AI and how it's going to interact with data sets because it's like if there's somebody best positioned to be the company that can help let me say I bring my data set to you and somehow we anonymize it and you can somehow give me some AI based insights back without really seeing that data set I know there's blockchain companies already that have been working on these things for a long time like the ocean protocol out of Berlin and others but I'm just curious is it something I'm sure IBM is way ahead of everybody and trying to think around the corner for this how to bring AI and algorithmic services a top data sets but the twain shall not really meet or we can stay GDPR compliant I'm not sure but I'd just be fascinated to hear where you guys weigh in on that if you see great opportunity here or if it's still too difficult to to get to that. Well I think it's great that you picked up on one of my first points actually were enterprise facing so we don't have those you know caches of consumer data so certainly data access is important to IBM I think it was interesting also Clark that you mentioned COVID-19 I think one of the projects we had was to use map data I think from approved public data to provide an app which you know you could see in your hometown what the cases were and so on so so definitely I think AI is a fascinating topic that crosses all sectors right it's there in health it's there in automotive it's just across all sectors but for that in order to train models we do need to to use data often the output we don't output the data itself right it's value that's added on top of the data but because that's such an important part of our strategy moving forward along with hybrid cloud yes it's a really interesting topic for us data access in general I would say that broadly we look at a number of spheres for that certainly any legislation that can help such as the EU data app but I did point to some of the copyright directives as well I'm great to see some of the opening up for text and data mining which is a tool used in AI solutions you know we're able to make use of that commercially that wasn't available in Europe before and it isn't available in the UK at the moment interestingly but also you know looking at broader policy initiatives around data access and I think again we've all mentioned open data granted that not all data under the data act is going to be available in that way you know it looks like it is going to be mixed data sets it's not going to be purely open but it would be great to see sort of more public sector data in non-personal data being made available in this way again with that kind of sort of trusted you know tried set of licenses that we can just access and make use of so yes Clark I think it's definitely an ongoing issue in a number of fields but particularly particularly with AI that's very interesting that we came back to AI because yeah we did have a question on the AI act and I have to say that from my perspective I just looked at the AI act a bit more you know from this ethical lens and not necessarily from a more you know interoperability or data sharing perspective but of course it opens up so many so many possibilities but actually when when Clark you talked about you know a simple experiment that could be done you know if the data act actually works in a couple of years I thought that Frank is going to jump on the topic you know how difficult it is probably that's my guess for many enterprises or also individual users to switch to next cloud for example and like if you see it you know like for your company do you see it you know like in the current state do you think that this is going to make it much more easy because you know there is this provision that you know like there has to be like 30 day support and continuity of the of the data services of the cloud services do you think that this can work one thing is of course that we have really touched yet is what kind of data structure and service we are talking about because there are there's a spectrum there is like on one hand there is something like files files is data structure that exists like for whatever 50 60 years there's a concept of a file it has a name is some content has a modification data that's it and that's fully understood you can call it open standard file and moving files around is easy so moving files from one cloud service to another is like super easy and we can do that on the other hand you have like really like extremely complicated data structures like i don't know let's say the tiktok social network which is like you have videos you have likes you have friends you have a social graph you have like messages you have all kinds of things and switching this kind of data model from one provider to another let's say you want to switch from i don't know what's a tiktok competitor i don't know tiktok one to tiktok two that's not possible right and this is not something that unfortunately can actually not solve with open standards because this is it's not possible to have an open standard because this is this market is developing so fast basically there's new features and functionalities pop up like by the day and it's a it would be a utopia to have some kind of common standards to make it portability between these kinds of systems and with next lot that's what you ask we have the same challenge we have switching like your files from one drive or google drive to next cloud that's super easy migrating your contacts and your calendar data and your email it's a bit harder but it's also that's also possible because there are open standards for this kind of data structures but then moving your teams conversation over from teams or slack to next cloud talk that's like super hard because like the the functionality of these different services are not even the same so i don't know maybe on on on teams you can like a message in slack you cannot like a message but you have a threaded view and the other one is not so basically there's no real data portability even possible so that's a bit of a of a challenge there which i also point to the also points to the fact that you know i mean even though we have so many provisions of data sharing the data act it will very much depend on the type of data which you know we all mentioned quite quite a bit of times so i'm very curious to see how you know how the discussions are going to follow and you know just like what the different types of companies and just platforms are going to respond to this but of course it's also addressed in the other files such as the dsa and the dma so again you know going to the idea that you know it's a bit of a complicated landscape when you you know after all um but as we are slowly uh slowly going to the end of the event um i would like to um ask you for a small i wouldn't say rundown or a summary but more you know just a couple of thoughts that you think are the most important and the topics that are the most important that you think that our audience should be left with after this event you know it could be questions it could be the topics that that we should you know maybe give a bit more thought to um and maybe let's um let's start with clark if you if you are ready sure yeah thanks so much paula and thanks to uh elder pierre who's not here but also to frank and anida and paula you for really fascinating discussion and also a lot of great questions from from the men and women that have been typing them thanks also to you for listening in and and putting in your two cents um i'd maybe maybe just sort of echo something that came up towards the end of the of the discussion and then maybe make one uh sort of other related plea but i think the the you know speaking on behalf of we're a think tank that was founded by people from the european digital space um and so as a result you know we're always listening to stakeholders that are operating in the market um and as i had mentioned you know we have gdpr now and we're soon going to have dma dsa ai act data act uh everything act um and so if i could just make a plea for all of the legislators uh and and today's event is sort of a great example of doing it especially being able to hear anida and frank really from the front lines um i would just hope that the legislators think about the end of how things are going to be applied how things are going to be lived because it's really easy you know in the laboratory to say we're going to design a great piece of legislation and it's going to work with these four others across the way um but to really think about how these things are going to be lived by a small business or a mid-sized business or a hyperscaler i think it's just so important because as we've seen with gdpr everybody who's working in the european digital space came up with a long list of things that you could do to improve it a little not throw it away but improve it uh and the parliament was simply not interested in even having that debate three years on uh even though you know some of the members of parliament published their list of you know 30 suggestions for how to fix gdpr so i think all those of us who are or in the digital space now um are excited about the possibilities of legislation like data act and other things that are coming we we see the possibilities for innovation and new markets that can be created with positive regulation but we also see the danger of things that lock us in to bad situations and then don't get fixed for a decade so i guess my plea is dear dear people who might not be on the on the call right now but um that those in power who are crafting these pieces of legislation really think long and hard about how it's going to be lived how it's going to be enforced how it's going to be implemented is there any remedy if it's not working well who do who do we call when it's not working please think of these things who do we call yeah that that's a very yeah i thank you um thank you frank yeah i think most was said already i think it's uh it's a huge opportunity a huge chance um for for your for competitive market um but the details are important um the details are important and i really hope that um that um yet the process will work in a way that a lot of feedback is still like put into the act um because it has the potential to become like a yeah a failure basically or a real success story and uh yeah as gluck said i hope that more input is like is like um look at um compared to the tdpr process okay thank you and uh anita your your thoughts you know like what what should we take out of this event uh the one thing i would say is please use your voice you know even for me i've been discussing these issues internally but it's been so nice to hear from other people today and i've learned today so use your voice and um you know see this is a positive time guys i mean what a time to be in legal tech or policy with data ar cybersecurity and i would also say to the audience um to use your responsibility to to train you know skill and up skill a new generation of talent in these fields i think the future is bright thank you thank you so much for such a positive note uh for the ending um and having said that uh thank you everyone for joining us today uh of course especially to our speakers it was a pleasure to have you here um i think we'll have you know some more events in the future on this and maybe in three years as clark you know through the idea you know i think we can organize actually yeah it's been three years since the previous event on the cloud so now you know we can we can establish it as a as a three every three year event or maybe earlier um but thank you so much and i hope that you that you enjoyed enjoyed the time that you spent with us today and having said that also i would like to invite you to join our next event that is happening on 23 march and it also starts at 4 p.m brussel's time and there we will discuss the increased attention on the digital autonomy and the concerns that you know regard you know topics that basically we touched upon today um but also the user control of it infrastructures and you know the whole idea of the open strategic autonomy and i can say what is quite interesting and i'm really looking forward to it we will publish paper on the same topic and it will be published uh this the day of the event uh so i hope that you know we can continue the conversation and you know just uh let's stay in touch uh so thank you everyone uh and enjoy your evening afternoon uh wherever you are and joining us from um and see you next week hopefully thank you thanks a lot thanks paolo bye bye