Rescuing Six Data Portabilities in the EU Digital Strategy with Purpose-Fit Data: A Constructive Techno-Legal Framework to Achieve Reusability of Machine Readable and Human-Meaningful Data

This thesis studies the underexploited potential of data portability within the European Union’s broader digital strategy, arguing that it is a critical mechanism for empowering users and enhancing market competition by enabling seamless data transfer between service providers. Although the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provisions data portability as a right (Art. 20 GDPR), its real-world application is hindered by both legal ambiguities and technical complexities. Adopting a dual “pars destruens” critique of existing frameworks and “pars construens” development of solutions, the research is grounded in a positive socio-technical perspective that claims technology must be understood and shaped to serve public values, not only commercial interests. A comparative legal analysis reveals that “data portability” has evolved asymmetrically across instruments—from the GDPR to the Free Flow of Non-Personal Data Regulation (FFNPD), Digital Markets Act (DMA), and Data Act—resulting in at least six distinct “portabilities” with inconsistent definitions and objectives. This conceptual shift hides the difference between mere data access and genuine data transfer, and traces the demarcation line between access- and transfer-based portabilities. Simultaneously, data portability embodies core tensions in EU data governance: privacy versus competition, data minimization versus reusability, and individual control versus cross-border data flow—to name a few. Technically, raw data (“symbols”) must be distinguished from information (“meaning”), a distinction often overlooked by law, leading to transfers that are syntactically correct but semantically and, more importantly, functionally void. Moreover, heterogeneity in data formats (e.g., JSON, XML), structures, and content richness creates barriers to machine-readability and contextual understanding. To overcome these challenges—and rescue data portability—the thesis proposes shifting from procedural “portability” toward substantive “information portability,” guided by a “fitness for purpose” data-quality principle already implicit in EU instruments such as the European Health Data Space (EHDS). A novel data-type stratified modeling framework defines essential properties of each data type according to domain, service function, and context, thereby clarifying the “quantum debeatur”—the legally ambiguous scope of data owed. By integrating metadata standards, fixed schemas, and semantic artifacts (e.g., vocabularies, ontologies), meaningful and enforceable portability can be achieved. Case studies, including HODA v. Google, demonstrate how incumbent platforms exploit definitional gaps to entrench market power, showing the need for trans-disciplinary assessments that integrate legal, technical, and economic insights. The thesis concludes by advocating for a harmonized “right to meaningful information portability,” ensuring that EU regulatory mandates ensure generation and production of data that are purpose-fit, machine-readable, and human-meaningful, thereby fostering an interoperable and competitive Digital Single Market.