Regulatory Approaches to Data Access and its Effects on Competition and Innovation in the Mobility Sector
The academic debate on access to and sharing of data and its impact on competition and innovation in the digital economy has developed very dynamically since the start of this dissertation (2016) and has highlighted numerous complex technological, economic and legal relationships. While the discussi...
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| Format: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Philipps-Universität Marburg
2025
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| Online Access: | PDF Full Text |
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| Summary: | The academic debate on access to and sharing of data and its impact on competition and innovation in the digital economy has developed very dynamically since the start of this dissertation (2016) and has highlighted numerous complex technological, economic and legal relationships. While the discussion initially focused on data ownership rights, the range of topics has quickly broadened in a wide variety of directions. Part of this discourse was always also the question of the extent to which the law, in particular competition law, needs to be adapted to the new technological conditions, and the analysis of proposals for new cross-sector or sector-specific data access regulations. While the issue of access to data and resources of the connected car was regularly cited at conferences as a prime example of data access-based competition and innova-tion problems, very few seemed to write about it. However, the fundamental problem of access to vehicle-related information is not a new issue that has arisen with the digital transformation towards the connected vehicle; access to repair and maintenance information and technical ac-cess to the vehicle itself (interoperability) have long been a decisive factor for competition and innovation in the secondary markets of the automotive sector. This problem affects not only independent workshops, but also manufacturers and dealers of spare parts and diagnostic equipment, and in some cases even authorized workshops and original parts manufacturers. In addition to this more technical information and access, the digital transformation of the car has created a variety of other data and access options that are of interest to third parties. Vehicle per-formance data could be used to detect wear and tear and replace parts before an accident occurs or the vehicle breaks down (“predictive maintenance”). Access to data on driving behavior ena-bles individualized insurance offers (“pay as you drive”) and remote access to the vehicle ena-bles new services in the area of car sharing and fleet management. Road traffic authorities are also interested in data from the connected vehicle, as this can provide important information on the condition of the road infrastructure and its capacity utilization, among other things, allowing infrastructure projects and public mobility services to be planned in a more demand-oriented manner and enabling a real-time response to traffic scenarios such as roadworks and accidents.
However, such data is often not available, but on the contrary, under the exclusive control of those actors who, due to the technical circumstances, are the first to obtain it. These data hold-ers, in turn, are often unwilling to grant access to the data for reasons of competitive strategy, especially if the data holder is in competition with the companies requesting access to the data. Since this is often essential data, i.e. data that is unique, non-substitutable and cannot be imitated, there is a risk that these data holders become gatekeepers who are able to control access to (potential) markets within the respective ecosystems and dictate the conditions of market entry in their favor.
This thesis addresses two such situations within the mobility sector. In the first situation (Chap-ter 1-3), car manufacturers have exclusive control over technical access to cars and their data due to the technical design of the connected car. This control enables car manufacturers to exclude all those independent service providers whose services depend on access to the vehicle and/or its data from the provision of independent services, thereby significantly hindering competition and innovation in these secondary markets. The articles in Chapters 1 to 3 examine this access problem and analyze the regulatory solutions that were new at the time of publication, i.e. the reform of the Type Approval Regulation in 2018 (Chapter 1), the right to data portability under the European General Data Protection Regulation that came into force in 2018 (Chapter 2) and the European Data Protection Act adopted in 2023 (Chapter 3).
In the second situation (Chapter 4), Deutsche Bahn has exclusive control over certain real-time mobility data (e.g. delays, track changes) due to its natural monopoly in rail infrastructure and its dominance in rail passenger transport, and refuses to share the data in a non-discriminatory manner. Multimodal mobility service providers (Mobility-as-a-Service) could use this data to offer multimodal (“door-to-door”) mobility services, including ticket booking and payment pro-cessing, but are prevented from doing so by the refusal of data access. In 2023, the German Federal Cartel Office decided that this behavior should be seen as an abuse of a dominant market position and ordered appropriate countermeasures. This article analyzes the regulatory intro-duction of a mandatory data trustee for the effective enforcement of data access obligations. |
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| DOI: | 10.17192/z2025.0109 |