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Court Ruling Shows The Internet Does Have Borders After All (csoonline.com)
itwbennett writes: Microsoft's recent victory in court, when it was ruled that the physical location of the company's servers in Ireland were out of reach of the U.S. government, was described on Slashdot as being "perceived as a major victory for privacy." But J. Trevor Hughes, president and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) has a different view of the implications of the ruling that speaks to John Perry Barlow's vision of an independent cyberspace: "By recognizing the jurisdictional boundaries of Ireland, it is possible that the Second Circuit Court created an incentive for other jurisdictions to require data to be held within their national boundaries. We have seen similar laws emerge in Russia -- they fall under a policy trend towards 'data localization' that has many cloud service and global organizations deeply concerned. Which leads to a tough question: what happens if every country tries to assert jurisdictional control over the web? Might we end up with a fractured web, a 'splinternet,' of lessening utility?"
The Location of data has what to do with its movement around the world?
It always exists in at least one place.
Even that is not a given. Think about a RAID5 spread over several legislations, where each hard drive is in another country. No legislation has control over a complete set of the information in the RAID5, and only if one reads a sector of it, its parts get requested in the different locations and combined to the real data. And only if all but one legislations agree, you are able to get the complete information, as the data from n-1 stripes can reconstruct the original.