Individuals should own and control their personal data, with tech companies required to obtain explicit licenses for any commercial use.

This was a substantive and closely contested debate on a genuinely difficult policy question. Both sides demonstrated familiarity with the relevant literature and regulatory landscape, but the debate ultimately turned on whether the Pro side could overcome the significant implementation challenges that the Con side repeatedly highlighted.

Pro built its case on a moral foundation—framing data ownership as a fundamental right analogous to intellectual property—and supplemented this with economic arguments about the data economy's extractive nature. Pro was strongest in the early rounds when establishing the normative case and pointing to the asymmetry between corporate profits and individual compensation. However, as the debate progressed, Pro increasingly struggled with internal contradictions. The most damaging was the simultaneous celebration of GDPR as proof that data rights work while dismissing GDPR's documented costs and limitations. Pro also oscillated between claiming licensing would be frictionless through automation and proposing data unions to manage complexity—a tension Con exploited effectively.

Con maintained a more disciplined argumentative structure throughout, consistently returning to three pillars: the ontological problem (data is relational and co-created), the economic costs (documented GDPR impacts, consent fatigue research), and the availability of better alternatives (sectoral regulation, fiduciary duties). Con's strongest moments came when dissecting Pro's analogies—particularly the intellectual property comparison—and when presenting specific empirical evidence about consent fatigue and GDPR's disproportionate impact on small firms. Con's weakness was a tendency toward status quo bias; the alternative framework of "contextual integrity" and fiduciary duties was gestured at more than fully developed.

The decisive factor was evidentiary discipline. Con more consistently grounded claims in specific, cited research (the Aridor et al. study on GDPR's economic effects, Acquisti et al. on the economics of privacy, the EU Database Directive evaluation), while Pro relied more heavily on broad statistics and moral framing. Neither side was exceptional in evidence quality—both engaged in some cherry-picking—but Con maintained a slight edge in specificity and consistency throughout all four rounds.