Peercraft ApS
Peercraft
The purpose of Peercraft is to create a basis for direct data driven commerce between commercial vendors and consumers - thus eliminating the need for "platforms" as overly costly intermediaries.
ID: 893652019939-76
Lobbying Activity
Response to Legislative framework for the governance of common European data spaces
31 Jul 2020
Peercraft is a member of MyData Global and supports the consultation response from this organization.
We would, however, like to comment further on the specific topic of data sharing costs that the impact assessment addresses in relation to the thematic clusters (iii) and (iv). The assessment expresses a need for "standards for discoverability of data and transparency on data quality through appropriate metadata descriptions, aspects of identification and, authentication of parties or objects party to a data sharing situation, .... It will examine whether new mechanisms are necessary to ensure adoption and use of common standards."
The main cost is not related to missing standards, but rather based on business models developed 20-30 years ago based on limitations of technological performance and original slow take-up by conventional businesses and traditional authorities such as business registers. Not to mention the lack of tools for individuals and SME's to directly discover simple supply and demand data. This has created a need for intermediaries and proxies to aggregate data and convey trust as well as information in complex indirect ways, that we now realize suffer from manipulation and high cost.
Certainly standards are necessary to implement new more decentralized ecosystems, where actors are substitutable and hence subject to competition on price and performance. But the most important part will be to lift the discussion from the technical level to the business level and to gather all the relevant parties needed to establish a consistent and wholistic infrastructure for a generic data sharing ecosystem.
Unfortunately, such an overall focus appears to be missing, when looking at current initiatives such as this one (EU Data Sharing Strategy), the company data part of the "High Value Data Sets" of the "Open Data Directive", the BRIS efforts by EU Business registers, and the current revision efforts for the eIDAS regulation.
Indeed, proper identity assessment of parties to data sharing transactions is paramount for discovery of the entities as well as their qualifications/reputation, services, and other data. But while consistent efforts have been made for the adoption of eID's for individuals in many EU countries, the current identity assurance mechanisms for companies do not to any degree provide the (low) cost, consistent assurance level, basis for discoverability and trust, nor scalability that will be needed to achieve widespread data sharing between the 25 million enterprises and 500 million individuals of the Digital Single Market (DSM).
So much more effective data sharing for EU individuals and SME's could be realized in terms of scalability, simplicity, and reduction of cost if the initiatives under thematic clusters (iii) and (iv) could convene representatives from these other sectors and projects starting by focusing on the joint DSM business objectives and then defining standards in view of both the legal authority structures and the technology generally available today. We are attaching a paper that discusses the major flaws of the current certificate based method for company identification and points specifically to how these problems may be eliminated by simple means by involving the proper authorities, such as business registries more directly in the process.
Also from an business perspective, it is essential to ensure that the discussion in relation to the thematic clusters (iii) and (iv) maintains a broad focus on data sharing, and is not limited to "reuse" of data as the thematic cluster (i). The data that businesses are most eager to share with others are the data about market supply and demand. If businesses can use the data sharing tools to find potential suppliers and customers more efficiently and less costly than using the current platforms, there is a much higher chance that they will also use the same data sharing tools to find other relevant knowledge sharing and collaboration partners.
Read full response