EU Data Union Strategy: RxC Contribution

The EU Data Union Strategy presents a critical opportunity to address the fundamental market failures threatening Europe’s information economy. AI’s capacity to extract, compress, and redistribute informational content undermines traditional pricing mechanisms for information goods, creating an existential threat to information producers across Europe.

Information Market Collapse

Information goods face a unique economic paradox: disclosure necessary for sale enables infinite copying at minimal cost. Thus creators struggle to capture the full value of their work, creating systematic underinvestment in informational goods.

AI dramatically accelerates this challenge by making information extraction and recontextualization exponentially more efficient. As a result, individuals and small firms face small and shrinking incentives to perform knowledge work, because their outputs are rarely fully unique, and are worth exponentially more when massively combined than when taken separately.

Without intervention, foreseeable consequences include:

• Collapse of information ecosystem
• Concentration of information production among large firms and state entities
• Erosion of democratic discourse dependent on diverse information sources
• Degradation of AI training data quality as original content creation becomes economically unviable

Sectoral Data Bargaining

The Industrial Revolution created similar challenges when new technologies reduced individual workers’ bargaining power. The solution was not merely enforcing competition, but enabling “countervailing power” through worker organization and collective bargaining.

The Strategy should prioritize such support for “sectoral data bargaining” – enabling information producers to coordinate through union representatives, in order to pool their data assets into a value-added, combined product offering and thus work for their shared interests in the data marketplace.

This approach would:

• Restore market power: Place information producers “upstream” of the AI value chain
• Maximize social participation: Ensure broad population involvement in AI development
• Improve AI quality: Incentivize high-quality, constantly-updating data streams
• Preserve democratic values: Maintain diverse information sources essential for democratic discourse

Key Recommendations

1. Collective Bargaining

The price of information depends on market power; without market power, markets fail to value information in a way that reflects the welfare they add to society. And AI erodes the market power of essentially every non-AI information producer.

The Strategy can help restore that market power by enabling sectoral coordination through union representatives, which would negotiate and establish sector-wide pricing and licensing terms that prevent AI companies and other third parties from bypassing collective agreements.

2. Attribution-Based Control

The Strategy should support the adoption of privacy enhancing technologies, such as the open source software (called “Syft”) developed by OpenMined Foundation, as it would allow data unions to maintain real-time “attribution-based control” over their content and monetize it on a per-use basis, rather than through bulk licensing. This lets them control who can use the data, how much of it they can access, and on what conditions (including what price).

Europe’s Strategic Advantage

Sectoral data bargaining aligns with European values while strengthening the EU’s position in global AI competition. Rather than slowing AI development, this approach would accelerate it by creating sustainable incentives for high-quality data production. The alternative – allowing information market collapse – would leave Europe dependent on AI systems trained primarily on data controlled by non-European entities.

This represents not just economic policy but a fundamental choice about whether Europe’s digital future will be shaped by democratic participation or concentrated market power. The historical precedent is clear: countervailing power formation drives innovation and social progress.