D2.2 Economic and regulatory analysis of data platforms and value creation models of the on demand economy

DECODE – DEcentralised Citizens Owned Data Ecosystem – aims to develop practical tools to protect people’s data and digital sovereignty. The project is building towards a data-centric digital economy where citizen data, generated by the Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor networks, is available for broader communal use, with appropriate privacy protections. As a result, companies, cooperatives, local communities and citizens will be able to use that data to build data- driven services that better respond to individual and community needs. This means rethinking the thorny questions around the ownership, control and management of personal data from an economic, legal, regulatory and technical dimension1. The DECODE deliverable “Economic and regulatory analysis of data platforms and value creation models of the on demand economy” presents two main aims: (i) Proposing an analysis of regulatory models for data platforms; (ii) Clarifying the logic of value creation that characterises the so-called on-demand economy, by analysing four case studies of dominant platforms. Both the objectives are necessary to develop T2.2 (“Data-driven disruptive and commons based economic models”) within the WP2 (“Decentralised Governance and Economic framework: Commons data platforms for digital sovereignty”). This deliverable analyses the dominant data-driven economic models, and clarifies the boundaries between the major data driven platforms and the so called on-demand platform economy, then it defines the different areas affected by currently existing regulatory models. This analytical work is essential to be able to by propose in our future work economic, regulatory, and technical alternatives to the dominant, centralised and monopolistic economic models of data-driven platforms, which exploit network effects and capture rent from network externalities, thus hindering innovation and eroding citizens’ digital sovereignty (D 2.4). This will contribute to the overall objective of DECODE to identify and experiment new political, economic, and legal regimes that recognize social and communal rights to data.