FantasticSearch

1. The Commission shall encourage and facilitate the development of self-regulatory codes of conduct at Union level (‘codes of conduct’), in order to contribute to a competitive data economy, based on the principles of transparency and interoperability and taking due account of open standards, covering, inter alia, the following aspects:

(a) best practices for facilitating the switching of service providers and the porting of data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format including open standard formats where required or requested by the service provider receiving the data;

(b) minimum information requirements to ensure that professional users are provided, before a contract for data processing is concluded, with sufficiently detailed, clear and transparent information regarding the processes, technical requirements, timeframes and charges that apply in case a professional user wants to switch to another service provider or port data back to its own IT systems;

(c) approaches to certification schemes that facilitate the comparison of data processing products and services for professional users, taking into account established national or international norms, to facilitate the comparability of those products and services. Such approaches may include, inter alia, quality management, information security management, business continuity management and environmental management;

(d) communication roadmaps taking a multi-disciplinary approach to raise awareness of the codes of conduct among relevant stakeholders.

2. The Commission shall ensure that the codes of conduct are developed in close cooperation with all relevant stakeholders, including associations of SMEs and start-ups, users and cloud service providers.

3. The Commission shall encourage service providers to complete the development of the codes of conduct by 29 November 2019 and to effectively implement them by 29 May 2020.