Post by Max von Grafenstein

It was to be feared: the way the GDPR is currently interpreted and applied by many has a negative impact on innovation processes. At least, that is the conclusion of the empirical analysis conducted by my colleague Nicholas Martin, with my input from a regulatory perspective, in our article “Innovation and the GDPR: Much ado about quite a lot” for the CLSR special issue “Towards a Competitive Digital EU” (see the link in the comments section below 👇 ). 🙈 This is a tragic result because the GDPR's regulatory approach is actually designed to not only leave sufficient scope for data-based innovations, but also to generate competition-promoting effects—at least for those entrepreneurs who comply with the law. To date, however, the opposite has been true: companies that do not comply with the GDPR have competitive advantages over legally compliant companies. 🛠️ An essential prerequisite for achieving these competition- and ultimately innovation-promoting effects for compliant companies is the effective and efficient design of the procedures for applying the GDPR. The high level of legal uncertainty in the application of the numerous processing principles and undefined legal terms means that many companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, prefer not to process data at all. This is a problem that large companies with the appropriate resources do not have. ⚖️ If European legislators want to implement their goal of reducing bureaucracy while maintaining the same level of protection with their Digital Omnibus proposal, they should focus primarily on the needs of SMEs. This is where the biggest problems lie in the application of the GDPR. My suggestions on how to do this will follow shortly in the same special issue. #gdpr, #innovation, #competition, #digitalomnibus Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, Nicholas Martin, Malte Beyer-Katzenberger, Frederick Richter 🇪🇺, Carolin Loy, Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider, Dr. Linda Bienemann, Christian Groß, Matthias C. Kettemann, Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung, Bundesministerium des Innern