A Novel, European Act of Data Governance The European Commission is proposing the world’s most ambitious data governance architecture — but it still ignores familiar, fundamental problems. Author: December 15, 2020 Margarethe Vestager speaks during a press conference on the Data Governance Act on November 25, 2020. (Reuters/Martin Bertrand) The European Commission’s recently proposed Data Governance Act is — as it urges in its own preamble — “a novel, ‘European’ approach.” The act is sophisticated and proposes a number of leading-edge, technocratic policy architectures for achieving its stated aim — which is restoring Europeans’ trust in data systems. And, at the same time, it focuses primarily on commercial rights, securing markets while leaving member states to manage the political and social fall-out. Counter-intuitively, the social impacts of large concentrations of commercial and political power, exerted through data and digital service markets, is often at the root of public mistrust. The market-first, figure out the social impacts later approach is, indeed, uniquely European — and is on full display in the Union’s political fragmentation, from the fallout surrounding Brexit, to the human rights tensions with Hungary and Poland, among others. The Data Governance Act is sophisticated, technocratically innovative, and very unlikely to resolve the foundational rights and infrastructure issues that build public trust and equity in digital systems.