Will the Council Proposal be adopted under the Portuguese Presidency?

On 19 May 2021, the Portuguese Presidency unveiled its third compromise proposal on the Data Governance Act, thus aiming at pushing for an agreement at Council before the Telecoms Council which will be held on June 4th, 2021.

The first proposal was presented during the Telecom Working Party on 25 February 2021. Based on the subsequent discussions in the Working Party, which took place throughout March and early April, the written comments received from the delegations, and the Joint Opinion of the EDPB-EDPS, the Portuguese Presidency prepared the second compromise proposal, which was presented in the Telecom Working Party meeting on 13 April. Following another round of discussions in the Working Party, as well as based on the feedback received from the delegations in the written comments and during two workshops organised by the Presidency in April and May, the Presidency has prepared the third compromise proposal.

This third proposal aims at clarifying the scope and the definition of key items of the Data Governance Act. In particular, it amends the definition of data intermediaries in article 2 to include the following amendment:

The following shall, inter alia, not be considered to be data intermediation services for the purposes of this Regulation:

(a) services that obtain data from data holders, aggregate, enrich or transform the data and license the use of the resulting data to data users, without establishing a direct relationship between data holders and data users.

This would in practice exclude services which are provided by credit scoring and business information providers from the scope of data intermediation services, thus removing both the incentivisation of data sharing but also the mere conduit approach put forward by the draft DGA which states that data intermediation services should put in place a fair level playing field and not promote their services amongst others.

The European Parliament is also actively working on the Data Governance Act, with amendments put forward by the IMCO Committee.

The next round of discussions at Council level will take place on May 28, with the aim of the Portuguese Presidency to get to a common position. Should this not happen because of some reservations of some Member States and also because of rough criticism from the European Data Protection Supervisor on the whole DGA approach, the Portuguese would present a progress report at the Telecom Council of June 4th.

Source: FEBIS