Tech Pro Brief

Mon 28 October 2024 | View online
Estimated reading time: 4-5 minutes

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Thank you for joining us for our daily Tech Pro briefing. Today we are covering the Coucil’s program as well as EU and UK data flows.


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🟡 Top story

Coming up

Here is a look at the agenda of the incoming Council working party on telecommunications and information society meetings:

  • 7 November:

    • Morning: ICT standardisation working party, with a debrief of WTSA conference with the three standardization organisations (ETSI, CEN-CENELEC), and 5G and 6G booster joint-undertaking SNS.

    • Afternoon: Internet governance working party, with interventions from the Commission and US-based internet governing body ICANN.

  • 12 November:

    • finalisation of the Council conclusions responding to the Commission's February white paper on telecoms.

    • preparation of the Telecom Council of Ministers of 6 December, including a debate on the digital decade and EU cooperation with the International Telecommunications Union

    • Generative AI and security

  • 21 November:

    • A presentation of the European Startup Nations Alliance's activities

    • France's preparation for the February 2025 AI Action Summit is going

  • 25 November: this working party will focus on postal services, with a presentation from Commission's DG GROW on the future of the sector.

  • 26 November: a debate on EU's international strategy on digital policies, which is yet to ve fully confirmed

  • 10 December: a handover session to the Polish Presidency

🟡 Data & privacy

Rocking the boat

The UK Prime Minister plans to "rip up" bureaucracy to promote growth, but straying too far from the EU data protection could prove costly.


Personal data has been flowing freely between the UK and the EU under so-called "adequacy decisions." These rulings by the EU Commission basically say that data protection standards are good enough in a third country for EU data to be transferred there.    


But that status is set to expire in June 2025, and the EU will reevaluate whether UK law provides adequate data protection guarantees.


The UK government unveiled a new bill on Wednesday (23 October) to update the law and unlock the economic potential of data.


Dubbed the Data Use and Access(DUA) Bill, some parts of it diverge from the GDPR:

  • The Secretary of State is given power to change what is classified as special category data to approve third countries for data exports.

  • It introduces "recognised legitimate interest" that can remove the need to do a Legitimate Interest Assessment, which would normally be required for a data processor's right to trump a data subject rights

  • It allows automated decisions more widely than GDPR, only requiring additional consent or need when special category data is used. This could prove significant for AI applications.


On the economic side, the bill gives room for the government to create more data spaces and introduces registers and frameworks for data sharing and identity verification.


The Government focused mostly on the economic potential in their announcement, saying that the bill will "boost UK economy by £10 billion" (€12 billion).


But while the bill aims to boost economic activity around data, losing the GDPR adequacy status could be its own headache, the House of Lords European Affairs Committee said in a letter to Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle on Tuesday. They urged the government to maintain EU data adequacy while attempting to fix problems with the GDPR.


"While compliance with GDPR can itself be costly, the loss of data adequacy would also lead to significant financial penalties for many organisations," the letter reads.

🟡 Competitiveness

Collision course

The first draft of the Council's Budapest Declaration on the New European Competitiveness Deal seems to contradict the latest draft of the Council's conclusions on the future of telecoms:

  1. The Budapest Declaration calls on the Commission to suggest a new strategy for the telecom sector, "building on the Letta and Draghi reports and their recommendations," while the telecom draft reads that the Commission should be mindful of the former Italian Prime Ministers’ proposals. EU countries telecom experts are unconvinced by the relevance of their recommendations.

  2. The Budapest Declaration supports a new telecom strategy with a "more efficient Single Market governance framework," which, in Letta and Draghi's report means a more Europeanised model. Yet, the telecoms draft dismisses these proposals, reading that the "management, licensing and organisation of radio spectrum falls within the national competence."

  3. While the Budapest Declaration suggests a new telecom strategy by June 2025, no date is set in the telecom draft, and EU countries would rather wait until the review of the EECC, set for December 2025.


The informal meeting of Heads of State and Government, during which the declaration should be adopted, is planned on 8 November in Budapest.

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Today’s briefing was prepared by the Tech team: Eliza Gkritsi, Théophane Hartmann, and Jacob Wulff Wold. Share your feedback or information with us at digital@euractiv.com.

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