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Justin Hendricks is CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press.. The views expressed here are his own.
In the year In 2018, tech companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter announced The Data Transfer Project (DTP), with the ultimate goal of enabling service-to-service data transfer to enable users to move their data between providers. Now, the three DTP contributors – Apple, Meta and Google – have joined together to create a new non-profit organization called the Data Transfer Initiative (DTI) to “dedicate engineering and manufacturing resources to the design and implementation of data transfer tools.”
The move comes as Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) reaches another milestone on May 1. On that day, the European Commission is expected to identify which firms will be designated as “gatekeepers” – those deemed to have a dominant position in the market. Such organizations are required to provide “free of charge, tools to effectively use such data portability and provision of continuous and real-time access to such data.”
Gatekeepers should ensure that users of their services can easily transfer their data to another service if they want to, and should deploy appropriate technical capabilities, such as application programming interfaces, he said. quickly and continuously. Companies supporting DTI want it to further develop such technical measures based on previous efforts to evaluate the open source framework and data transfer features that power Google Takeout, Facebook Transfer Your Data, and Apple’s Data and Privacy page. Other such services as software libraries.
Chris Riley serves as the organization’s founding executive director. Riley was most recently at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC, and before that led Mozilla Corporation’s global public policy efforts.
“Data portability is always a good thing in theory, but I think it’s limited in practice, and I want to change that,” Riley said in an interview. The initiative believes the tools it creates in its consortium model will help consumers realize the benefits of mobility and make the offering more than just a “compliance tax” on tech firms.
Legislation requiring data portability is also under consideration in the United States. It was reintroduced last May by Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) and his cosponsors Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO). The Senate ACCESS Act, passed by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), requires major communications platform providers to maintain “a clear set of third-party accessible interfaces (including application programming interfaces)” for the secure transfer of user data to or from users. Competing communication providers operate in a user-oriented, structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format.
The DTI announcement comes with the Data Transfer Project 1.0 open source code base.
“Over the past few years, DTP contributors have introduced new data types and made significant improvements to the functionality and reliability of DTP libraries and adapters,” Riley explained in a statement. “The result is a code base stable enough to power the live streaming features available to billions of Internet users today.” DTI is a 501c4 organization. Beyond educating policymakers about the benefits of data portability and potential, Riley will focus on codebase development and other engineering solutions, not lobbying for specific legislation.
Justin Hendricks is the CEO and editor of Tech Policy Press, a new nonprofit media effort focused on the intersection of technology and democracy. He was previously the executive director of the NYC Media Lab. He spent more than a decade at The Economist, including vice president, business development and innovation. He is an Associate Research Scientist and Associate Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. The opinions expressed here are their own.
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