Some reasons to think about big data as data commons
The role of data in the current digitally soaked society is so important that data has been repeatedly defined in several and different spheres as the new oil, a new factor of production, and the currency of today’s digital market. 90 per cent of the data present in the world today has been created in the last two years and this huge amount is expected to grow by 40 per cent annually over the next decade, a forecast consistent with the diffusion of smartphone usage and the expansion of the Internet of Things ecosystem.
The term “big data”, besides referring to the ever increasing size of this stream of information, relates to the new generation of technologies designed to collect, aggregate and analyse it quickly and cost effectively, in order to extract variably reliable prediction and decision-making patterns for whatever purpose in whatever sector, be it public or private. Assessing and optimizing credit risk in the lending industry, implementing citizen-focused public policies, deploying more police forces where crimes are most likely to occur, or avoiding overproduction and resource waste in agriculture are just a handful of examples of big data analytics’ applications.
It is worth noting that the so-called “pure players” of the big data market (that is companies obtaining all of their revenues from the sale of big data products and services) account for just 5 per cent of the overall market, while the remainder is generated by dominant tech-companies providing to a great extent online services.
In Europe, more than the half of this sector is absorbed by US-based companies whose revenue source typically leverages a two-sided platform business model, where users’ data, as well as their “attention” to the highly-tailored advertising banners they are shown during their interactions with the platform, may be deemed as the fee to pay for the “free” service they enjoy. Google and Facebook can be considered the most representative advertising platforms, as they capture together more than a half of all the growth in global online ad spend.
Another increasingly profitable and younger data-fuelled economic sector, it too originated in the innovation kingdom of the Silicon Valley, is that of on-demand platforms. Uber and Airbnb are the most notorious and the most valued amongst a sizeable bunch of “asset-less” platforms that operate through hyper-outsourced business models, whose precariousness – especially in the case of Uber – is corroborated by the noticeable mismatch between market capitalization and turnover.
On the whole, the digital economy presents some major challenges.
The most visible applies to privacy and security issues. The amount of data that requires protection (i.e. personal identifiable data) will significantly grow over the next few years. In this field, the US legal framework is far less strict than the European one.
