Trade Win No. 7
HOW OPEN DATA SPACES ENABLE TRUSTED DIGITAL TRADE | Carol Anderson
Digital services trade depends on moving data between organizations and across borders. Yet many firms remain hesitant. They fear losing control of sensitive information, breaching data-protection rules, or becoming locked into a single platform. A public-private partnership now offers a practical answer. Open “data spaces” let participants share data on clearly defined terms while keeping ownership and control. This is a quiet but significant win for trusted digital trade.
The foundation is open source and open standards. The Eclipse Dataspace Components project, hosted by the vendor-neutral Eclipse Foundation and initiated with contributions from Microsoft and industry partners, provides a common data connector, a digital gateway that manages secure and trusted data exchanges among participants. It implements two open standards, the Dataspace Protocol and the Decentralized Claims Protocol (both approved as ISO/IEC standards). These define how organizations publish data offers, negotiate usage policies, verify each other’s credentials, and transfer data. Because both the code and the protocols are open, and built on a widely used technology stack, no single vendor controls the network.
Catena-X shows the model working on an industrial scale. Founded in 2021, it is the automotive sector’s collaborative data ecosystem, joining vehicle makers, suppliers, and software firms on shared, open infrastructure. Many European auto makers such as BMW and Mercedes, along with suppliers such as Bosch, participate in the ecosystem. Participants exchange data for supply-chain traceability, quality management, and product carbon footprints without handing it to a central intermediary. A supplier can prove the emissions of a component to a customer and disclose nothing more. The same open, digital standards and technologies used to build data-sharing services for manufacturing sector can readily be reused in other sectors to support cross-border trade. Examples are professional, financial, logistics, health, and other data-intensive services that depend on trusted information exchange.
The trade benefits are concrete. Data protection and sovereignty come first: data stays at its source, and machine-readable usage policies travel with every offer, so the provider keeps control after sharing. Transparency follows: shared catalogues and explicit policies make the terms of every exchange visible and auditable. Compliance is built in: policy enforcement sits inside the connector, helping participants meet obligations such as the EU Data Act and rules on Digital Product Passports and sustainability reporting. The benefits extend to small and medium enterprises. Because the software is free and open, smaller firms can join global value chains and share data with large buyers on fair, standard terms without paying to enter a proprietary platform.
The wider point is the partnership itself. This is shared, neutral infrastructure built by many hands: an open-source foundation, technology companies, industry associations including the International Data Spaces Association, and public bodies. Through its Data Space Adoption Forum, the International Data Spaces community is now carrying the approach beyond automotive into manufacturing, health, energy, and public services.
For the services agenda at the center of this year’s Public Forum, that matters. Trusted, interoperable data sharing is becoming basic infrastructure for cross-border services, much as shipping containers and payment rails were for earlier eras of trade. Building that infrastructure as an open, standards-based public good, rather than a set of closed private networks, keeps digital trade competitive, keeps it compliant with the rules that citizens expect, and keeps it open to firms of every size. That is a model worth backing, and worth scaling.
