Digital Omnibus: EU Commission wants to consolidate data laws

From four to one: With the digital omnibus law, with which the EU Commission wants to simplify some rules in the digital sector at once, the Open Data Directive, the Free Flow of non-personal Data Regulation, the Data Governance Act, and the Data Act are to become a single law—the then revised Data Act.

The meaningful parts of the regulations, which originated at different times, are to be transferred to the Data Act, explained the Deputy Director-General of the Commission's Directorate-General Connect, Renate Nikolay, at an event hosted by the Federal Association of the Digital Economy (BVDW) in Berlin on Wednesday evening. This is intended to ensure that in the future, primarily a law with rules on data usage will stand alongside the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Nikolay explained the initiative. In fact, the various legal acts partially overlapped.

Cookies soon in GDPR?

However, the GDPR itself is also to be amended in terms of content, reported the high-ranking EU official responsible for the omnibus initiative. On the one hand, the European Court of Justice has recently expanded the possibility of further use of pseudonymized data in its case law, which is now to be taken up and further specified by the Commission. On the other hand, a regulation for the handling of cookies is also to be included in the General Data Protection Regulation, after this topic has so far been addressed in the interplay between the GDPR and the outdated E-Privacy Directive.

Data retention is to get its legal act

Further elements of the revision, conceived as a complementary regulation to the GDPR and officially declared a failure this year, are to find a new regulatory home in other legal acts, such as the Digital Networks Act, which was recently postponed to January 2026. A planned EU-wide regulation on data retention is also to be included in its own legal act.

With the proposals for simplification now announced, the EU Commission would also address some of the wishes that the Federal Government had previously sent to Brussels had. But even if the EU Commission and the member states could agree relatively quickly on this, when the proposals officially land on the table in two weeks, without the approval of the European Parliament, they could not become law.

(fds)