Recital 4a

Recent developments have demonstrated that advanced digital services, including data processing, cloud computing and artificial intelligence systems, may be subject to unilateral restrictions, export controls, licensing limitations or other measures adopted by third-country authorities. Such measures may lead to the interruption, degradation or withdrawal of services provided to users established in the Union, irrespective of their contractual rights. In view of the strategic importance of artificial intelligence and data-processing capabilities, excessive dependence on providers exposed to such measures may pose risks to the Union’s economic security, technological sovereignty, research capacity and industrial resilience, in particular where the services concerned process or rely on high-value datasets, including trade secrets, industrial know-how, research data, strategic business information or data originating from natural persons, whether in identifiable, pseudonymised or otherwise non-identifiable form. It is therefore appropriate to mitigate such dependencies through interoperability, portability and switching measures, business continuity arrangements, privacy-preserving technologies and appropriate technical and contractual safeguards against unilateral service disruption or termination, including ‘kill switch’ scenarios. Such measures should apply irrespective of the degree of integration of the services concerned or of the legal status of the entities concerned under Union law, including data intermediation services and recognised data altruism organisations.

The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) provides for the establishment of an internal market and the institution of a system ensuring that competition in the internal market is not distorted. The establishment of common rules and practices in the Member States relating to the development of a framework for data should contribute to the achievement of those objectives, while fully respecting fundamental rights. It should also guarantee the strengthening of the open strategic autonomy of the Union while fostering international free flow of data. The data economy has to be built in a way that enables undertakings, in particular micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as defined in the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, and start-ups to thrive, ensuring data access neutrality and data portability and interoperability, and avoiding lock-in effects.