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Comment by pabloski | Hacker News Reader

Why? It is Brexit not Internexit. The servers will be reachable, even after the Brexit. So, where is the problem? Maybe they will not be able to exploit the tax loops?

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There might be tariffs, and there might be concerns about moving data between the EU and a non-EU country.

It seems incredibly obvious that making lots of long-term investment when the future of the UK is so completely unknown would be a risky move. So you cut investment for a bit, and we see what happens later.

> There might be tariffs, and there might be concerns about moving data between the EU and a non-EU country.

More specifically there are concerns about storing EU-citizen data outside the physical EU and in ways which could not comply with the requirements of EU privacy laws.

The "why" is extensively covered in the article.

Facts and information don't matter for some people

The problem is that most people stopped conscious reading nowadays.

The first order 'why' is, yes. It would not surprise me that Microsoft expects a discreet call from Westminster, and after a 25 year discount on electricity fees and business rates (or whatever) has been secured, they will, after careful reconsideration, arrive at the conclusion that after all, the UK is indeed the most appropriate location for the DC.

That doesn't solve the compliance problem: data about EU customers can't be stored outside of the EU. So Microsoft will need continental data centers anyway.

Did you RTFA ? They build servers in Eastern Europe and then ship them to UK datacentres. If tariffs come in, they would have to spend quite a bit more. As you correctly point out, a networked server is a networked server and will be reachable no matter what, so might as well drop it in Frankfurt or Amsterdam and save on the tariff.

This is in addition to the legislative issues about handling EU data, which may or may not be side-stepped by UK keeping all laws on the matter. But considering we'll badly need a free-trade agreement with the US right after we leave, that's likely one of the areas where the Americans will ask us to drop shields...

I wonder how important (in %) is that cost in relation to TCO of the equipment (and actually running the datacenter)

Not disagreeing, just finding this information interesting

I suspect it will be one factor but when combined with the possibility that the market for these data centers might turn out just to be the UK I can see why they might take a conservative approach.

and as the pound has dropped in value that also has an effect.

>Did you RTFA ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

A little meta but well done for following the guidelines in citing the guidelines...

EU enforces very strict data privacy laws. UK seems to be going in the exact opposite direction, with snoopers charter subjecting everyone to mass collection of data, and who knows how far UK will take it after British citizens lose the protection of EU. If I owned data centers I would also consider moving them elsewhere :P

While some of that is true, the snooper's charter is UK law while the UK is still in the EU, so there must be more to it than that? A lot of commenters are talking about the UK as if it has left the EU already; the process hasn't even begun.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/dec/21/eus-highest-cour...

Yeah, but EU itself is worried about snoopers chapter + many independent organisations are saying that probably it's not even legal to have such a law in the EU. None of that matters though, because UK is already acting in a "we're doing this, you can't stop us" manner. Even if the EU parliament ruled tomorrow that UK cannot order all ISPs to collect browsing data on its citizens, do you think UK would care? It would be just further "proof" that brexit is such a wonderful thing, surely you don't want EU meddling with internal affairs like spying on your own citizens, no? There's no stopping this train now, sadly.

Not only that but they were almost certainly already collecting much of this data before it was written into law.

The snooper charter is very likely to be challenged and be declared unlawful, as British Courts have already ruled that indiscriminate data collection contravenes EU law and ECJ rulings.

Of course UK might leave before such ruling.

That doesn't work for UK companies who need to control venue of execution and location of data storage and keep it UK centric, depending on the level of classification that is stipulated.

That's likely a fairly niche segment right now and not likely to become significantly less so. Maybe the UK Gov mandates processing of data which is currently processed in EU within the UK following brexit but it's still 700m+ users in EU vs ~60m in UK. I know where I'd have my primary presence in that case...

Privacy laws? Safe Haven like provisions?

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