On July 13, the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre's expert Daria Kotova made a presentation at CPDP LatAm Conference 2022, the main topic of which was Artificial Intelligence and Data Protection.
The panel, in which Daria Kotova participated, focused on the BRICS countries' approaches to data portability and interoperability between ecosystems and providers of goods and services.
The right to data portability is one of the guarantees of a user's freedom in the digital environment, which gives him/her the right to withdraw his/her data from one digital ecosystem if he/she wants to switch to another. Interoperability, in turn, is a complex phenomenon that encompasses the entire spectrum of relationships between multiple platforms or ecosystems in the marketplace or relationships between vendors and the ecosystems to which they connect.
Interoperability not only means that ecosystems have open and common technical standards for interoperability, open software interfaces, but also non-discriminatory free access to ecosystem services, free transfer of data and information.
Both data portability and interoperability are important to ensure competition in digital markets, which is often threatened by the desire of digital platforms and ecosystems to exert unlimited control over their connected users and providers.
While the EU and the U.S. have been discussing these two concepts for quite some time, the BRICS countries are just beginning to formulate their vision and test the regulatory regimes that ensure the greatest openness of technology companies. I
- n Brazil, this has been realized in the financial sector, where the state has stimulated the development of common infrastructure and open banking.
- In India, the recent example of a government-created "platform for platforms" in the e-commerce sector (Open Network for Digital Commerce) shows the possibility of building open ecosystem models beyond the financial sector.
- Notions of data portability and interoperability play an active role in China, where industry regulators impose openness obligations on digital platforms and ecosystems, in addition to a number of other obligations related to access to data collected by platforms.
In Russia, the debate about interoperability and data portability is aimed at removing regulatory barriers in the Personal Data Protection Act, which is not modern enough for a developed national digital marketplace. Nevertheless, some initiatives of FAS Russia and the cases reviewed by the agency, as well as the proposal of the Bank of Russia to introduce an open model for dominant digital ecosystems, have set the tone for the work of the expert community to improve the regulatory environment. Without this work, improving the competitive environment in Russian digital markets will be difficult, noted the expert.
"Developing a conversation on portability and interoperability within BRICS is important to strengthen the unified agenda of the association on the regulation of digital markets. BRICS markets are characterized by their saturation and a sufficient number of strong national players, so BRICS probably needs its own vision of what role data portability and interoperability play in building an open competitive market,"
said Daria Kotova.
CPDP (Computers, Privacy and Data Protection) is one of the leading data protection and privacy conferences in Europe and around the world. CPDP LatAm is the the Latin American edition of CPDP. CPDP is a non-profit platform originally founded in 2007 by research groups from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Université de Namur and Tilburg University. Now after a decade it has grown into a platform carried by 20 academic centers of excellence from the EU, the US and beyond.
