German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/188, pp. 24461-24462.
Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen. Valued colleagues.
We debate today a Union delegation motion for implementation of the EU Data Act. For a clarifying debate, it is nevertheless important to come to speak once again of the Data Act itself. This must by September 2025 be converted into the national law of the EU member states.
Valued colleagues of the Union delegation, Frau colleague Hoppermann, in regards your motion, I see light as well as shadow. How do I come to this evaluation?
Let us first look at the EU Data Act. As so often, the EU Commission also with the Data Act intervenes in the business and everyday life of the people. With the decree, it wants to break up the existing data oligopoly of the large tech concerns and facilitate the access of KMUs and start-ups to valuable, machine-readable data. From that, the Mittelstand also should profit. A thoroughly good goal! It remains to await how that actually in practice is implemented.
Right honorable ladies and gentlemen, I want now to give attention to an important problem point of the EU Data Act. It remains unclear in regards the users’ right to the access of their data. Here should be distinguished between commercial and private users. Private users presumably rather have the interest that their data, when it is already uploaded, be stored only for a brief time. And thus the question occurs to me: Valued colleagues of the Union, will your motion, in view of these areas of tension, legislate the required implementation of the EU Data Act?
Your motion for the implementation of the EU Data Act hides some of the Act’s deficiency; for example, the public emergency named in the text of the decree. By means of this, businesses can almost be compelled to make available their database to the pertinent authorities.
Franziska Hoppermann (CDU/CSU): The Data Act has been decided. Nothing needs be hidden!
I find this problematic in no place in your motion.
The risk of an abusive data delivery in the name of a public emergency is not at all fabricated. Here is also required besides a clear definition of unmistakable enforcement regulations [Durchführungsbestimmungen].
Next critical point. Your demand to entrust the Federal Network Authority with the role of a data coordinator, we view critically. As a Federal supervisory authority, the Federal Network Agency belongs to the operating area of the Federal Ministry for the Economy and Climate Protection. Thus the independence is limited, despite all the bundled professional competence. We thus hold it better to create an autonomous office for data coordination, as for example is the case with the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.
Franziska
Hoppermann (CDU/CSU): Who is meanwhile a woman!
Right honorable ladies and gentlemen, a strengthening of the German digital economy’s innovation and competition capability is unquestionably important. This however is in direct relation with the performance capability of a modern society and also with the digital rights of the consumer. These are not appropriately valued by the Union’s motion, as well by the EU Commission. Valued colleagues of the Union, you in your motion thereby fritter away the possibility of at least partially removing the Data Act’s weaknesses by its implementation in national law.
So far, I still see in your motion some shady sides which we in the digital committee can in common polish.
Many thanks.
[trans: tem]
