Memo to the commissioner responsible for digital affairs

Memo

Memo to the commissioner responsible for digital affairs

Publishing date: 04 September 2024
Authors: Bertin Martens

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You should pursue two main objectives: first, seek to narrow the digital investment and uptake gap between the United States and the EU; second, aim to better leverage data as a true economic production factor, alongside labour and capital. Both are critical to boost productivity growth in increasingly data-driven industries.

You should push for innovation-friendly implementation of recent regulation, taking advantage, for example, of flexibility given by the Artificial Intelligence Act, and identify areas in which very large EU platforms could be established. Simplification can be pursued when the general data protection regulation comes up for review, and a balance between the benefits of generative AI and copyright protection needs to be struck. Data governance can be improved, with the European Health Data Space as a model. Your objective should be to maximise the societal and innovation value of data pools, over and above the private value of the data.

Key actions:

Digital investment and productivity
Innovation-friendly implementation
Societal value of data

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About the authors

Bertin Martens

Bertin Martens is a Senior fellow at Bruegel. He has been working on digital economy issues, including e-commerce, geo-blocking, digital copyright and media, online platforms and data markets and regulation, as senior economist at the Joint Research Centre (Seville) of the European Commission, for more than a decade until April 2022. Prior to that, he was deputy chief economist for trade policy at the European Commission, and held various other assignments in the international economic policy domain. He is currently a non-resident research fellow at the Tilburg Law & Economics Centre (TILEC) at Tilburg University (Netherlands).

His current research interests focus on economic and regulatory issues in digital data markets and online platforms, the impact of digital technology on institutions in society and, more broadly, the long-term evolution of knowledge accumulation and transmission systems in human societies. Institutions are tools to organise information flows. When digital technologies change information costs and distribution channels, institutional and organisational borderlines will shift.

He holds a PhD in economics from the Free University of Brussels.

Disclosure of external interests

Declaration of interests 2023