DTI in Europe - now on a continuous and real-time basis
It was with great excitement and personal pride that I joined the DTI team in February as the newly created Head of Europe. It’s a title that reflects the ambition of the organisation, as much as it does my ‘first hire on the continent’ status.
I’m enjoying working out what the role entails, and probing where it starts and ends, but in practice I think I’ll break my time into three main chunks: talking to people about how critical and impactful widespread data portability is going to be; thinking and writing about how to make this vision a reality; and bringing other people together to have these conversations.
The latter part of the role admittedly sounds fairly nebulous, but I think it is where I (and DTI) can have the biggest impact. This is because data portability isn’t something one organisation, person, or government can make happen on their own, or unilaterally enforce onto others. A great deal of collaboration and coordination is necessary - sometimes between direct competitors - for it to be effective and deliver the real-world outcomes that matter.
Although I only joined last month, in reality I’ve been working in partnership with DTI for some time. And now with the benefit of hindsight, my joining DTI feels like it was a foregone conclusion since my first conversation with its Executive Director Chris Riley in July 2023.
Although I approached this call with a degree of caution, I came away from it with a gut feeling that Chris was someone I could trust. A year or so later and that trust had fully transferred to DTI as a whole - I was left in no doubt that we were pursuing a common goal and a shared vision for the world.
Investing in Europe
Although there are many important and impactful conversations and initiatives taking place all around the world, the centre of gravity for data portability is undoubtedly in Europe (arguably located somewhere between Brussels and London). This is why DTI has been investing in building its presence and brand in the UK and EU, for example through sponsorship of the Smart Data Forum in London last year (and again this year), and speaking at the 2024 Digital Platforms Summit hosted by CERRE in Brussels. Participating in set piece events like these is important, but engaging in and shaping public policy discussion also requires informal coffees and unplanned chats in the margins of a conference. And one thing technology can’t overcome is time zones! Boots on the ground were needed.
There is good reason to think that data portability is only going to rise up the agenda on this side of the Atlantic. The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is having a profound catalysing effect on data portability - but implementation was always going to be an ongoing process. With little detail in the DMA on how the data portability provisions in Article 6(9) should be implemented, the best way to tackle unanswered questions will be through open dialogue and collaboration. This is DTI’s secret sauce, demonstrated already through events such as the Portability in Practice event that we hosted in partnership with Google, attended by a diverse range of stakeholders from the growing portability ecosystem.
Authorities in the UK are proactively considering interventions of their own that could replicate the DMA, or even go further and wider. The UK government, with its soon to pass Smart Data powers, is looking at a wide range of opportunities for user-led data sharing, with a view to extending the success of Open Banking into other sectors such as energy, finance and retail. In parallel, as it operationalises its new regulatory regime for digital markets, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is actively considering whether to use its shiny new toolkit to require data portability in the context of general search and in mobile ecosystems. With recent pro-growth commitments from the CMA to operate at pace, with proportionality, predictability, and due process (the so-called “4Ps Framework”) it is easy to see how data portability interventions could be high up on its agenda. Maybe portability stands to be the fifth P?
In all of these active conversations, a bridge is often needed to help bring together many diverse stakeholders with differing interests, incentives, and resources. I firmly believe that DTI is best-placed to adopt that role, and I guess the feeling must have been mutual.
As I reach out to engage with people over the coming weeks and months - whether it’s with existing contacts or to make new ones - I hope I will leave the same impression on others as Chris left on me in that fateful intro call. Data portability is our mission, and we mean it.