ABOUT TRUSTS Project

Several national research projects, private companies, and H2020 projects are researching and developing technology, business models, ethical and legal guidelines to enable the promise of the Digital Single Market (DSM). European organizations will need to adopt data-driven innovation and digital transformation to keep up with international competition and global supply chains. Any race to the marketplace brings along legal and ethical issues. The rules of competition law, intellectual property law as well as data protection and privacy law, are called upon to regulate different aspects of the DSM (e.g., platform regulation, standardization and interoperability under proprietary models of ownership, data ownership, etc.). Keeping this competitive advantage resides in the ability to operate cross-border in Europe, and that requires that the existing national projects commit to a level of interoperability that goes beyond individual “open APIs”.

This is in itself a very challenging task because

different national projects have different scopes, in terms of both technology development and addressed industry domains
research projects at European level address specific aspects of data market-enabling technologies, but do not explicitly address the integration and interoperability of business-focused national platforms
commercial data markets provided by private organisations are currently predominantly service providers rather than scalable data markets.

Project Objectives

The amount of data available and produced every day is exploding – data has become an important raw material that is of high importance in nearly every industry sector worldwide. Thereby a vital data economy and a successfully working Data-Services Ecosystem in Europe is one of the factors to enable and ensure sustainable employment and growth and thereby societal stability and well-being. Data have swept into every industry and business function and are now an important factor of production, alongside labour and capital.

The European Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy was adopted on 6 May 2015. It includes 16 specific initiatives, which have been delivered by the European Commission by January 2017. Legislative proposals are currently being discussed by the co-legislator, the European Parliament and the Council.

The DSM Strategy is built on three pillars

Access: better access for consumers and businesses to digital goods and services across Europe
Environment: creating the right conditions and a level playing field for digital networks and innovative services to flourish
Economy & Society: maximising the growth potential of the digital economy.

TRUSTS will ensure trust in the concept of data markets as a whole via its focus on developing a platform based on the experience of two large national projects, while allowing the integration and adoption of future platforms by means of interoperability. The TRUSTS platform will act independently and as a platform federator, while investigating the legal and ethical aspects that apply on the entire data valorization chain, from data providers to consumers, i.e., it will

set up a fully operational and GDPR-compliant European Data Marketplace for personal related and non-personal related data targeting individual and industrial use by leveraging existing data marketplaces (Industrial Data Space, Data Market Austria) and enriching them with new functionalities and services to scale out.
demonstrate and realise the potential of the TRUSTS Platform in 3 use cases targeting the industry sectors of corporate business data in the financial and operator industries while ensuring it is supported by a viable, compliant and impactful governance, legal and business model.

Free flow of non-personal data is a prerequisite for a competitive data economy within the Digital Single Market3. To fully unleash the data economy benefits we need to ensure a free flow of data, allowing companies and public administrations to store and process non-personal data wherever they choose in the EU. The respective Regulation aims at removing obstacles to the free movement of non-personal data. It was formally signed by the European Parliament and the Council on 14 November 2018 and will start to apply in May 2019. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), on the other hand, already provides for the free movement of personal data within the Union, next to its primary goal of protecting personal data. Together with the GDPR, this Regulation will therefore ensure a comprehensive and coherent approach to the free movement of all data in the EU. Next to these two legal instruments, the European Commission recently published a Proposal for a Regulation on promoting fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services (P2B Regulation). The new Regulation seeks to create a more predictable and transparent trading environment online, and will offer new possibilities for resolving disputes and complaints. The first Report on Policy Conclusions analyses the role of policies in shaping the scenarios, highlighting the potential impact of the Digital Single Market Strategy. It explores also alternative scenarios of the social role of data, in terms of the power to control and access data. But while digitisation is everywhere, adoption is uneven across companies, sectors, and economies.