Whether preparing for the next pandemic or monitoring the safety of generative AI, policymakers, business leaders, and academics need access to data from both within and outside their national borders. But instead of policies that enable data to flow more freely, constraints have become the norm. Globally, data flow restrictions more than doubled between 2017 and 2021. Late last year, the U.S. withdrew its long-standing request for the WTO to prohibit data localization requirements for e-commerce. This is a highly symbolic move from a country that has traditionally been one of the staunchest supporters of tearing down barriers in the digital world.

As a result of these shifts, the digital world has never been more fragmented. But we are not here to argue that all digital barriers must come down. As researchers from academic institutions in the U.S. (Harvard), Europe (INSEAD), and China (Tsinghua), and from a global company (Boston Consulting Group), we recognize that governments will continue to feel an obligation to protect their national security interests and citizens’ data. If anything, we may see more barriers erected in the years to come. But we shouldn’t—in fact, we can’t—give up on cross-border data sharing.

Recent events have illustrated the positive impact of sharing—not only within industries (as we have recently argued) but also across borders. For example, it took Mayo Clinic researchers in the United States just six weeks to calculate the increased risk of mortality from the COVID-19 Delta variant thanks to large-scale studies conducted on patient data from different national databases. This experience, though enabled by the exceptional circumstance of a global pandemic, is still illustrative of the power of sharing. But if the rise in data regulation continues at its current rate, such cross-border data sharing will become more and more difficult. This would have major implications, both on the global economy and on our collective ability to address issues that can only be solved by using data from multiple countries, such as anticipating natural disasters and coordinating responses and global aid, or identifying food safety issues in today’s weakening international supply chains.