Re:New EU data blockage as German court would ban many cooki...
by shadowgovt on Monday December 20, 2021 @10:27AM
(#29625930)
It's also interesting as an example of jurisdictional conflict.
US law grants the US government broad (some would argue over-broad) reach into the digital activities of US-based companies independent of where those companies physically house their data. The great truth of the Internet is that it's a location-disrupting technology: modulo latency, the computer next to me on my desk and a computer in Sydney, Australia are logically exactly as close (by which I mean: fully equivalent whether I'm fetching data from one or the other as a client). But of course location still matters for the oldest location-focused institutions on the planet.
I predict that unless higher courts just decide to disregard the reasoning in this case, the resolution here will be either an international treaty between the US and the EU to clarify data access rules here or a simple jurisdictional mess: whether an EU citizen's data can be sniffed by a US company from computers in the US will be entirely up to who's government cares most.
US law grants the US government broad (some would argue over-broad) reach into the digital activities of US-based companies independent of where those companies physically house their data. The great truth of the Internet is that it's a location-disrupting technology: modulo latency, the computer next to me on my desk and a computer in Sydney, Australia are logically exactly as close (by which I mean: fully equivalent whether I'm fetching data from one or the other as a client). But of course location still matters for the oldest location-focused institutions on the planet.
I predict that unless higher courts just decide to disregard the reasoning in this case, the resolution here will be either an international treaty between the US and the EU to clarify data access rules here or a simple jurisdictional mess: whether an EU citizen's data can be sniffed by a US company from computers in the US will be entirely up to who's government cares most.