Abstract:
This article examines the public administration of data in the Italian legal order, where the data has become a structural element of administrative action rather than a mere by-product of the digitalisation of documents. It first reconstructs the European Union framework, showing how four regulatory logics (protection, circulation and re-use, data-as-infrastructure and algorithmic control) have successively shaped the data held by public authorities without ever being fully coordinated. It then turns to the Italian transposition, which is dispersed across the Digital Administration Code, the National Digital Data Platform, the rules on the opening and re-use of data and the law on the protection of personal data, and which has never been consolidated into a unitary body of rules. Two sectoral fields, healthcare and land governance, illustrate the resulting fragmentation, before the structural weaknesses of the national system (organisational dispersion, lack of capacity and technological dependence) are assessed. The article concludes by arguing for the recognition of the administration of data as an autonomous public function and by outlining the corresponding prospects for reform.
