Last week, we submitted our response to the European Commission’s consultation on the Digital Omnibus (PDF file). While the Commission already published its draft regulation in November 2025, the feedback period will remain open until 13 March 2026. We reiterate our belief that a more transparent and deliberate process, including extensive consultation with stakeholders before the release of the proposal, would have led to a stronger outcome.
The European Commission’s Digital Omnibus package aims to simplify and consolidate EU data legislation, including by integrating the Open Data Directive into the Data Act. COMMUNIA welcomes the objective of streamlining the EU’s non-personal data framework and sees clear benefits in moving from a directive to a regulation.
However, the proposal also introduces changes that risk weakening a cornerstone of EU open data policy: the “open by default” principle. If adopted as currently drafted, these changes could reduce access to public sector information and undermine legal certainty for re-users across Europe (see our reaction blog post from December).
Differentiated charging should not mean restrictive licensing
A key issue is the proposal’s assumption that public sector bodies must rely on licensing restrictions in order to charge “very large enterprises” for the supply and re-use of data. In reality however, charging and licensing are separate questions.
Charging mechanisms can operate independently from licensing conditions. Public sector bodies can apply differentiated charging models, such as tiered fees for API access, without restricting re-use rights. For this reason, allowing restrictive licences is neither necessary nor proportionate to address economic asymmetries between re-users.
Protecting standard open licences protects the public interest
COMMUNIA is concerned about incentives for public sector bodies to move away from standard open licences and toward actor-specific licensing arrangements. This would make public sector datasets harder to re-use in practice and more difficult to combine with other sources, ultimately fragmenting the open data ecosystem and weakening one of the EU’s major achievements: a predictable and interoperable licensing framework for data re-use.
The societal impact would be significant. Open knowledge projects such as Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons demonstrate how open public sector information supports education, research, innovation, and public access to information. These projects rely on standard open licences like CC0 and CC BY, which allow broad re-use and combination of materials. Introducing actor-specific licence conditions would disproportionately harm these public-interest uses.
Our recommendation
COMMUNIA therefore calls for removing the possibility for actor-specific licence conditions and for reinforcing the use of standard open licences. This would safeguard interoperability, reduce legal uncertainty, and prevent the proliferation of non-standard licensing terms that would burden not only open projects but also SMEs and other non-gatekeeper actors.
