Data has become one of the most critical assets of the European digital economy. From artificial intelligence and platform markets to public services and industrial innovation, access to and sharing of data increasingly determine competitive dynamics, market entry, and the effectiveness of regulation. At the same time, data sharing raises complex legal questions: how to reconcile openness with the protection of personal data, trade secrets, and intellectual property; how to prevent data-driven market foreclosure; and how to ensure that regulatory interventions foster innovation rather than stifle it.
Over the past decade, the European Union has responded to these challenges with an increasingly dense—and at times fragmented—regulatory framework. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Free Flow of Non-Personal Data Regulation, and, more recently, the Data Governance Act (DGA), the Data Act (DA), and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) have profoundly reshaped the legal landscape. Together, these instruments signal a clear policy shift: data sharing is no longer merely encouraged, but in certain contexts actively mandated as a tool to promote competition, innovation, and fairness.
It is against this background that our recently published edited volume, Data Sharing Regulation in Europe (Routledge, 2025), aims to offer a systematic and enforcement-oriented analysis of the EU data-sharing regulatory landscape.
The volume brings together scholars with expertise in competition law, data protection, and intellectual property—Björn Lundqvist, Joanna Mazur, Marco Botta, Mariateresa Maggiolino, and Lillà Montagnani—to examine how data sharing is governed across legal domains and how regulators and enforcers can navigate the resulting tensions.
- An integrated approach to data sharing regulation
A central premise of the book is that data sharing cannot be understood through a single legal lens. Data is non-rivalrous, multifunctional, and context-dependent; it circulates across public and private actors and across sectoral boundaries. As a result, regulatory interventions in one field inevitably affect others.
The volume therefore adopts an explicitly integrated and interdisciplinary approach. Rather than analysing individual legislative instruments in isolation, it examines how different regulatory frameworks interact in practice, with particular attention to enforcement challenges.
The first part of the book focuses on how data and data sharing are conceptualised and regulated. It clarifies who the key stakeholders are, what types of data are at stake, and how general and sector-specific regimes shape access and reuse (by Björn Lundqvist). Particular attention is paid to the protection of personal data (by Joanna Mazur), highlighting how GDPR principles both enable and constrain data-sharing mechanisms. Importantly, data protection law is treated not merely as a constraint, but as a constitutive element of the EU data-sharing architecture. The analysis also addresses emerging issues such as data valuation and compensation (by Marco Botta), which are becoming increasingly relevant as EU law moves towards mandatory access regimes.
Building on this foundation, the book then turns to competition law (by Mariateresa Maggiolino) and intellectual property (by Lillà Montagnani) as key interfaces between exclusivity and access. From a competition-law perspective, data can function both as a source of market power and as a lever for opening markets. The chapters explore when refusals to share data may raise antitrust concerns and how competition law interacts with newer forms of ex ante regulation, including the DMA. Intellectual property rights are analysed not as absolute barriers, but as flexible legal tools whose scope and justification must be assessed in light of broader regulatory objectives. This part of the book speaks directly to enforcement dilemmas in which IP protection, trade secrets, or innovation incentives are invoked to resist data-access obligations.
The final part of the book, authored by this blog posts’ authors, brings these strands together by analysing the interplay between data protection, competition law, intellectual property, and data-sharing regulation. This synthesis is intended also for enforcement bodies, which increasingly operate at the intersection of multiple legal regimes rather than within clearly separated doctrinal silos.
- Enforcement challenges and regulatory gaps
One of the book’s key contributions lies in identifying gaps, overlaps, and tensions within the EU data-sharing framework that directly affect enforcement. While recent legislation has significantly expanded the regulatory toolkit, enforcement remains uneven and institutionally complex.
From an enforcement perspective, authorities are often required to reconcile competing objectives: safeguarding fundamental rights, promoting competition, and preserving incentives to invest and innovate. Data-sharing obligations under the Data Act or the DMA may come into tension with GDPR principles if interpreted without sufficient coordination. Similarly, competition law remedies involving data access must account for intellectual property protection, cybersecurity concerns, and sector-specific constraints.
The book highlights that enforcement is not merely about applying rules ex post. Enforcement also plays an ex ante role, shaping incentives and expectations through guidance, prioritisation, and coordinated interpretation. Without shared analytical frameworks and institutional dialogue, enforcement risks becoming inconsistent, unpredictable, and vulnerable to strategic behaviour by well-resourced actors.
- Looking forward: data sharing after the Digital Omnibus
Although the book was completed before the publication of the European Commission’s Digital Omnibus Regulation proposal, its analytical framework is particularly helpful for understanding the direction—and the risks—of the current reform debate.
Presented as a simplification initiative aimed at enhancing EU competitiveness, the Digital Omnibus would significantly reshape the data governance landscape. Among other changes, it proposes to repeal the Data Governance Act, the Open Data Directive, and the Free Flow of Non-Personal Data Regulation, consolidating their core elements within a revised Data Act, while simultaneously amending key access, refusal, and enforcement mechanisms.
From a structural perspective, this reform goes beyond technical streamlining. By re-centring EU data governance around the Data Act, the Omnibus risks shifting the balance from a governance-oriented framework—based on institutional stewardship, public-interest access, and structured intermediation—towards a more market-driven and industry-facilitating model. This shift is reflected, for example, in the narrowing of public-sector access to privately held data and in the broader grounds for refusing data sharing on economic-risk grounds.
While certain elements of consolidation may enhance coherence, particularly with respect to public-sector data reuse, the proposal raises important questions for enforcement and institutional coordination. Weakened governance mechanisms combined with greater discretion for data holders risk undermining the effectiveness of data-sharing obligations at precisely the moment when enforcement authorities are expected to play a more active role in ensuring fair and open data markets.
Seen through the lens developed in Data Sharing Regulation in Europe, the Digital Omnibus debate reinforces a core insight of the book: the effectiveness of EU data law depends not only on the content of individual instruments, but on the coherence of the overall regulatory ecosystem. Simplification that prioritises market facilitation without sufficient attention to governance structures, rights protection, and enforcement coordination risks deepening fragmentation rather than resolving it.
- Concluding reflections
Data Sharing Regulation in Europe does not offer a single blueprint for regulating data. Instead, it provides a conceptual and analytical framework to support regulators, enforcers, and practitioners in navigating an increasingly complex legal environment.
For the EULEN community, the key takeaway is that effective enforcement in the data economy depends on understanding the interdependence of legal regimes. Competition law, data protection, and intellectual property are no longer autonomous silos, but interconnected components of a broader system of data governance.
As the EU continues to refine its digital regulatory architecture, this integrated perspective will be essential to ensure that data sharing serves its intended goals: fostering innovation, enhancing competition, and protecting fundamental rights in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Maciej Bernatt is a Full Professor of Law at the University of Warsaw. He holds the Chair in European Economic Law at the Faculty of Management, University of Warsaw and he is the director of the Centre for Antitrust and Regulatory Studies. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies and the co-director of ASCOLA Central Europe Chapter.
