Google has committed to adding new data transfer capabilities to Takeout, including for YouTube, next year in response to an investigation by Italian competition regulators.
According to Reuters, this was the result of an Italian startup that works on data exports filing a complaint about the portability of Google data. In response, Google made three commitments that the regulator has accepted to end the investigation.
The first two will be new features for Google Takeout that let users “facilitate the export of data to third-party operators.”
A third will “allow direct data portability from service to service.” This specifically applies to user-generated data from Google Search and YouTube.
That third commitment sounds like an expansion of Google’s existing work on the Data Transfer Initiative (previously called the Data Transfer Project) that allows for the direct transfer of user data from one service to another. The canonical example is moving your Google Photos library to iCloud/Apple Photos or vice versa. As such, you don’t have to first manually download gigabytes of photos and then upload it yourself. The services automatically handle the transfer behind-the-scenes, which preserves your bandwidth and is faster.
It makes more sense to apply that concept to YouTube than Google Search, so it remains to be seen what will be involved. Today, Google Takeout lets you download uploaded YouTube videos, as well as search history and comments.
In the Authority’s view, the commitments submitted by Google ensure significant automation of the procedure available for data export (Takeout). They also improve the interoperability mechanism that makes the data available in the Google ecosystem accessible to third-party platforms
According to Google, the “direct service-to-service portability solution” is coming Q1 2024. In 2022, the company pledged $3 million and engineering to the Data Transfer Project, and the upcoming launch could be the culmination of that.
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