Actually this has been asked no later than today :-)
There are two aspects, one formal and one more fundamental:
- formally, this project is funded by a budget line earmarked "blockchain" by the EP. End of the story for those who refuse to understand the fundamental reason :-)
- fundamentally, you need a system that keeps a log of what data "belongs to" (was uploaded by) whom and then allows other actors access to that data "against payment".
But if this project hasn't budged yet (it should have been out in 2017) is because of lack of political consensus around "against payment": some private actors want to extract payment for data which is public and should be free; the Commission was considering forcing them through legislation to surrender that data for free; the blockchain offers the magic solution of "writing in a ledger" the value transfer and create a magic triangle: actors accessing the data pay with the blockchain token which they could have received from the Commission for free (so data access is free as the Commission wants); the private actors accumulate the token and come to the Commission to exchange it for euros (so they get real euros for the data as they want); Commission acts as a kind of internal exchange for the token of this blockchain; and all this comes out of the box when using a blockchain - if you had to use a database with signed entries that also implements a ledger you'd end up ... redeveloping a blockchain ...
The lingering question is "where do the euros come from" but then I'm just the IT guy, I proposed the solution and FISMA seemed happy. They'll need to come up with the answer to that but anyway, the good thing is that by recording a "debt", it "cuts the problem in smaller bits" - gives time to negotiate further how and at what rate those tokens are going to be exchanged ...