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Comment by deaux | Hacker News Reader

Misleading title by Reuters.

The title should be "US orders diplomats to fight _EU_ data sovereignty initiatives".

Why? Because the US is far too pussy to fight the other countries that have such initiatives - some of them reaching further than the EU's - knowing that unlike the EU those countries are definitely not going to take their shit.

I can tell you that if the US says to Japan or Korea, just to name two such examples, "stop enacting privacy/sovereignty laws that interfere with US big tech or we tariff you" , there's absolutely zero chance they're going to be listened to and the only thing it will do is make people hate the US.

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I don't think it's going to be anymore successful in the EU, honestly. The last couple of years have EU politicians throughly over their shit, and it's unlikely many concessions to US BigTech can be bought without serious reciprocity on the table (for example, a major expansion of US military aid to Ukraine)

Not only europe:

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...

https://apnews.com/article/chile-united-states-china-visa-sa...

I don't think it's right to say "privacy/sovereignty". As gestured towards in the source article, Japan and Korea have joined the US's preferred data privacy forum https://www.globalcbpr.org/. Data sovereignty is not a common idea outside the EU, and AFAIK even the current American government doesn't object to US citizens' data being stored in foreign servers under foreign jurisdiction.

Data sovereignty is almost the default in Korea and common in Japan. It has been a common idea there for decades, in fact there are laws about it. The big corps there were plenty familiar with the CLOUD Act and such many years ago when 99.9% of EU corps couldn't give less of a shit. Percentages are completely different.

Joining of a forum is meaningless in itself, the actual actions of the governments and businesses in their usage vs abstinence of US clouds is ehat matters.

Joining a forum is meaningless in itself, but it's a pointer towards broader differences in attitudes towards enforcement. Japan is a big country which multiple companies I've worked for do business with, yet I've never had to take a training course about what I, not living or working in Japan, must do to comply with Japanese data protection law.

(Should I have had to, and companies just don't bother because Japan is smaller? I guess I'd believe that, although I'd still be surprised that I've never heard about a Japanese data enforcement action against a foreign company.)

> Japan is a big country which multiple companies I've worked for do business with, yet I've never had to take a training course about what I, not living or working in Japan, must do to comply with Japanese data protection law.

Ironically another contrast with the EU; not talk but actions. Keeping things on prem, keeping it on local clouds. How many of the pure Japanese companies (not subsidiaries of foreign corps) you worked at had all their customer data on AWS/Azure/GCP? Unless you worked with a very specific subset of them, overall it's a much lower percentage than the EU. And then Korea is even a lot lower than that.

Devil's advocate might say "well Japan is just like that because of other reasons, in reality they don't care about privacy or data protection". But a lot of those reasons are still linked to a broader idea of sovereignty, which is keeping things national.

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