Space-Based Data Providers in the EU and U.S.

Can the EU Space Act streamline European space licensing without imposing broad new compliance burdens on firms outside Europe? This paper examines the March 2026 Compromise Text and its legal context to answer this question. In this version of the Act, the term “space-based data provider” maps onto no established EU legal category and has a circular definition. The result may not be a full-fledged data regime so much as regulatory uncertainty for foreign firms with respect to proportionality, anticircumvention, and the third-country equivalence provisions applied to regimes such as that of the United States. Uncertainty itself can be a compliance burden and may undercut the streamlining the legislation is meant to deliver. Because the U.S. has no single space regulator capable of granting the reciprocal recognition that the statute demands, a sector-specific agreement may be the only realistic pathway to fulfill this goal. The paper also ad-dresses changes made between the June 2025 draft proposal which treated the cyber provisions as lex specialis, a sector-specific override of the NIS2 Directive, while the March 2026 Compromise Text reversed course and yields without prejudice to the NIS2 regime.

Sarah Oh Lam

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Sarah Oh Lam is a Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. Oh completed her PhD in Economics from George Mason University, and holds a JD from GMU and a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. She was previously the Operations and Research Director for the Information Economy Project at George Mason School of Law. She has also presented research at the 39th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference and has co-authored work published in the Northwestern Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property among other research projects. Her research interests include law and economics, regulatory analysis, and technology policy.