US Exports: "The Cloud"? | Hacker News Reader

US Exports: "The Cloud"?

journal.dedasys.com

8 pointsdavidw9 comments

Data sovereignty is a huge deal in Europe. There is no way a US hosting provider can gain a meaningful market share without using local facilities. See Amazon's ec2-eu-west.

That means losing the advantage of a weak dollar, since you'll be paying a lot of bills in the local currency.

I wonder if they'd be able to get around that with some kind of legal promise.

Also, that's primarily going to affect European companies storing their data on US servers, right? US companies offering services where Europeans go and sign up for them is more of a caveat emptor situation, I think.

> Data sovereignty is a huge deal in Europe. There is no way a US hosting provider can gain a meaningful market share without using local facilities.

That's not obviously true. The US' Safe Harbor scheme is acceptable in the EU for some things.

Google "safe harbor eu data" for general information and "appengine safe harbor eu data" for a specific case.

It doesn't matter what's acceptable from a legal standpoint. The overwhelming perception in Europe is that hosting data in the US is a risk. That perception might not be entirely grounded in reality, but it has a very real impact on the market.

> It doesn't matter what's acceptable from a legal standpoint.

I agree.

> The overwhelming perception in Europe is that hosting data in the US is a risk.

Which stakeholders have that perception? (Serious question.) Specifically, what kind of customers care? What kind of investors care?

If "the cloud" becomes an important export, people in Notamericastan beware: Screw with us, and find out your data is subject to American law, subpoenas, and courts.

Everyplace has laws, subpoenas and courts. The US legal system has certain well-known defects, but so do many other countries' systems.

My point is that people might be subject to a rude shock when they realize their data produced by and for their business processes is subject to the laws of a foreign country.

Ah, yes, that's certainly a potential sticking point. It will be interesting to see how legal systems evolve and adapt to how easy it is to "globalize" via the internet.

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