The Data Act is supposed to make it easier for European consumers and businesses to access the data generated by their internet-connected devices, and to encourage the sharing and reuse of that data by a variety of businesses and public-sector organizations. It’s also meant to give smaller companies a stronger hand when negotiating data-sharing contracts with larger partners—and when trying to switch cloud providers for the crunching of their data. 

The European Commission proposed the bill in February 2022, and the European Parliament cleared it in March, so it’s now in final “trilogue” negotiations between those institutions and representatives of the bloc’s national governments. Advocates for the bill say it could have particularly powerful implications for artificial intelligence, by making large amounts of industrial data available for the training of A.I. models. It could also have major implications for the development of “smart cities,” they say. 

However, the proposal has plenty of critics, with Big Tech firms sounding off through their trade associations. The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) complained in March that the law was too vague—which is something Germany has also been concerned about—and lacked strong safeguards for the protection of trade secrets, among other issues. 

It’s certainly unsurprising to see U.S. tech firms complain, as they tend to be the big beasts that the bill aims to tame. But some of the EU’s biggest tech CEOs have also weighed in now, via a letter calling on the European Commission to “pause and rethink” the legislation. 

Signatories included Siemens CEO Roland Busch and SAP CEO Christian Klein, along with representatives of the DigitalEurope trade body, whose members include a mix of U.S. and European companies ranging from Google to Bayer. The letter, which Fortune has seen, was sent to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last Thursday.

“Despite progress made [over the past year], the current proposal is not yet fit for purpose and could do lasting damage to the competitiveness of some of Europe’s most successful companies employing millions of people,” the letter read, adding that the forcing of data-sharing would be “breaking the backbone of future data-driven European business models, with little guarantee of what comes next.

“Safeguards are needed to ensure that companies can refuse requests to share data where trade secrets, cybersecurity, health, and safety are at risk,” the signatories wrote. They also complained that negotiations are happening at “breakneck speed…leaving little room to discuss these complex details in depth,” and lobbied against the bill’s cloud elements. 

“The Data Act should…preserve contractual freedom, allowing cloud providers and customers to agree on terms and conditions that reflect business needs,” said SAP’s Klein in a DigitalEurope statement. “Fixed-term contracts should not be questioned by the Act as they have proven to be beneficial for both cloud providers and customers.”

The European Commission responded by telling Euronews it “isn’t trying to change European or national law on trade secrets. However, it’s important that trade secrets aren’t used as an excuse for not sharing data. We have to find the balance there.”

That balance will need to be struck in the trilogue negotiations, which tend to be accompanied by particularly feverish lobbying—partly because they’re the last chance to modify a law, and partly because they always take place behind closed doors. Whatever the result, Europe will soon be regulating most types of data, from personal to industrial, in some kind of way.

More news below.

Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Data Sheet? Drop a line here.

David Meyer

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman. 

NEWSWORTHY

Heads of state barred from Bluesky. Social media app and Twitter competitor Bluesky will not be allowing heads of state on the service for now, the official account announced late last week. Typically, social media platforms thrive on having well-known figures to increase users on the platform. But Bluesky signaled that it will be a temporary policy, saying it cannot accommodate them in its beta testing phase yet. The invite-only social media app with roughly 60,000 users is in the process of developing and improving key features like content moderation.

Tech workers see their wealth dip. In 2022, the median pay for employees declined at more than a dozen well-known tech companies, the Wall Street Journal reports. And while company stock is often a key part of a tech employee’s total wealth, many didn’t sell shares once they vested, assuming that stock prices would increase. But they’re now well below their 2021 heights. With the wealth techies had hoped to use now gone, some are delaying big-ticket expenses like homes. Startup employees have been hit especially hard, with many startups seeing a lower value and delayed IPOs. 

Virgin Galactic prepares for commercial service. Billionaire Richard Branson’s space tourism company will send a crew of four to space later this month with the aim of validating its spaceflight system and “astronaut experience.” It will be its first crewed flight since July 2021 and a prelude to a commercial flight in June that will carry officers from the Italian Air Force. Virgin Galactic is separate from Virgin Orbit, the Branson-founded satellite company that declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April. TechCrunch reports that Galactic plans to start testing Delta-class ships by 2025 and enter commercial service the year after. 

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

66%

—The share of rural carriers slated for pay cuts this week as the U.S. Postal Service launches an algorithmically generated pay setup known as the Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System. Workers say they weren’t trained on how to accurately document their workload using the system, and a handful of Democratic senators have asked USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to publicly disclose the algorithms behind the system and limit the surveillance technology to only evaluating routes.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Investors lost billions betting on crypto. Now this lawyer wants Sam Bankman-Fried, Shaq, and dozens of other celeb endorsers to pay the price, by Shawn Tully

Netflix’s golden goose ‘Stranger Things’ hit by writers’ strike as final 5th season delayed, by Christiaan Hetzner

Twitter breaks its silence on bug that showed private tweets to a wider audience, telling users it’s been fixed almost a month later, by Kylie Robison

Sam Altman lists the startup rules ChatGPT maker OpenAI broke on its way to a nearly $30B valuation, by Steve Mollman

Ex–Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer admits spending $4B for Netflix—now worth over $140B—would’ve been a better ‘transformative acquisition’ than Tumblr, by Steve Mollman

BEFORE YOU GO

The group archiving Imgur. Later this month, image-sharing service Imgur plans to delete nudity and pornography as well as “old, unused, and inactive content” not linked to an account. But it’s not clear what will be included in the latter, so members of the comedy website Something Awful are helping with downloading source images of as many Imgur links as they can. The Something Awful owner, who goes by Jeffrey of YOSPOS, told the Verge that the work is progressing, and they’ve secured multiple copies of a roughly three-terabyte collection of pictures and short videos on hard drives. “A good deal of the modern internet is treated as transient and ‘okay to delete whenever,’ and that is a real shame,” Jeffrey said.