New EU BigTech regulation creates a new data challenge

The European Union, through the EU Digital Services Act, will unveil new regulations aiming to create a more competitive marketplace for all businesses. The regulator has always been at the forefront of ensuring the reach and power of BigTech organisations is fair and controlled.  Once the Act is enshrined into law, the world’s biggest technology companies will have to consider who governs the data hosted on their platforms. This is only the beginning of a much wider global implementation of the regulation and BigTech firms will need to reassess its technology infrastructure to ensure the answer the regulator’s requests in a fast, accurate manner. 

 

The EU Digital Services Act puts the onus on BigTech so they are responsible for the products and services that they are offering. The regulator has moved as fast as it can to create a competitive market environment for every business operating in the region. On a technological level, there is complexity which the BigTech firms will need to overcome and it is how they monitor and analyse all of their content, virtually in real-time.  

 

Being able to present accurate, real-time information when the regulator comes knocking is a challenge in digital forensics in a global data lake environment. BigTech organisations have scattered repositories of data across the globe and they have to act rapidly and decisively to remove illegal content once found. 

 

Europe is world-leading at digital regulation and this means the rest of the world will likely follow their lead, like they did with EU GDPR. For BigTech, today starts a process of ensuring that the underlying infrastructure provides fast and accurate information when those inevitable questions come.