“Digital technologies are more than just an economic sector; they are a vital element of competitiveness, the lifeblood of our economies, and increasingly of our societies”
If anyone had doubts about the importance that Luxembourg’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union attaches to all things digital, this sentence spoken during the “European Data Forum” by Xavier Bettel, the country’s Prime Minister, must surely have laid them to rest.
The 2015 conference, which was held in Luxembourg on 16 and 17 November 2015, focused on the following question: “How to exploit the integration of data in a European digital single market?”
This yearly conference, which is dedicated to the challenges of Big Data and the digital economy and is a magnet for players in industry, research, government and community initiatives, emphasized the need to create a single market for digital data in order to ensure that European players were not at a disadvantage relative to their competitors worldwide. This position was also defended by Andrus Ansip, the Vice President of the European Commission in charge of the European Single Market, who emphasized the crucial importance of ensuring that citizens can trust the confidentiality of their data – which has become a commodity in a market that is growing by around 40% per annum.
Luxembourg has extensive experience in this field, thanks to the fact that its financial sector was making use of the services of this sector of activity well before Big Data became one of the most profitable sectors of the economy.
