This case may be the leading edge of a huge wave with a global sweep.
The sticky point may be that the locality of data is impermanent and ambiguous. In the MS case, though the data is said to be stored on a server in Ireland, it could just as well be distributed, moved or duplicated anywhere, and for all we know it already has been.
Eventually laws will have to come to terms with the implications of the Internet: data, like a flock of migratory birds, for its own reasons goes one place to another and knows nothing about national boundaries.
one global country would probably fix that... or I guess you could end the Internet... but to tell you the truth, "cloud computing" needs to end instead.
This is a joke only up to a point. The current legal landscape emerged throughout the last few centuries mostly in response to commercial pressures: as commerce grew in range, volume and needs, so did laws, agreements and conflicts.
We now have a situation where global commerce is real, both in a physical and logical sense. The law, both at national and international level, just doesn't know how to deal with it. Companies design hardware in Massachusetts, produce it in China, sell it in Europe, and file their accounts in Caribbean islands. They develop software in Romania, run it on servers in Texas, sell it to the Brazilian market, support it from India, and file accounts in Luxembourg. This stuff could only be done by a handful of players back in the '70s, and we could deal with it on ad-hoc basis ("dude, we know your money is in Switzerland, just open a token factory in my constituency and we'll call it even"). Now it's just how business works everywhere, and we need real processes to scale up.
What rules can be defined and applied? How are they going to be enforced? Who is responsible for amending them? These big questions are the real challenge of this century for us "First World", and some harmonization will eventually have to emerge one way or the other.
I think it's going to be very hard for countries to work out how to deal with the issues. Pretty sure the Internet is going to continue to exist and provoke questions about what "national boundaries" mean in this context.
Predictions are dangerous, but probably the forecast for the future is that it will be even more "cloudy", whether we like it or not. Of course, can't do much about the weather anyway...
The sticky point may be that the locality of data is impermanent and ambiguous. In the MS case, though the data is said to be stored on a server in Ireland, it could just as well be distributed, moved or duplicated anywhere, and for all we know it already has been.
Eventually laws will have to come to terms with the implications of the Internet: data, like a flock of migratory birds, for its own reasons goes one place to another and knows nothing about national boundaries.