IGF 2023 Town Hall #66 Data Access and DMA: Tools and Rules for Digital Empowerment

Data is a global resource, and data access is a fundamental right, including data portability. Protecting it in practice is a different matter. One law taking a big step forward in this direction is the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which includes new language mandating that designated gatekeepers provide data portability, not only to users but also to authorized third parties, and not only in bulk but also continuously and in realtime. Just as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation had global repercussions, so too will the DMA, particularly its data portability and access obligations.

In parallel to legal developments, organizations like the new Data Transfer Initiative (DTI) are working to build tools to help people use data portability to their benefit, including in particular those who have limited device capacity or local internet connectivity.

In this town hall, a representative of the Delegation of the European Union to Japan will join the Executive Director of DTI to speak briefly to the state of play of these evolving legal frameworks and technologies. More importantly, though, the session’s organizers hope they can learn from the participants, and that the participants can learn from each other, sharing their experiences with data access and their thoughts and ideas.

As regulators and software developers collaborate to expand the scale of data portability and access, the IGF community’s global perspective will help eliminate myopia and ensure benefits to digital equity and opportunity.

The session will be an interactive discussion, weaving contributions from online and the room. The moderator of the workshop will give the floor to participants by the order they raise their hands, to avoid giving preference to those who are attending onsite. Online participants will be encouraged to turn-on their videos and introduce themselves in the chat, so all attendees can see who has joined the session. The remote moderator will actively solicit comments and questions from online participants throughout the session.