Re: European Commission daft – official
> The only thing that big cloud players can do to keep EU data under EU privacy law is to keep it in EU data centers.
That alone is not sufficient.
If the company is US based, then any data stored anywhere in data centres it has control of is "fair game" to the US authorities. Hence why the argument that Enron could have escaped having some stuff found out by hosting stuff overseas is complete rubbish - the men in crisp suits knock on the door, hand the officers a bit of paper, the officers hand over the data or go straight to jail.
This is the basis of the Microsoft case. Here, Microsoft in the US do not directly control the data centre in Ireland - that is a separate legal entity managed by people in the EU and subject to EU law. Since Microsoft US doesn't (I assume given the effort they've put into the corporate structure) have access to the data, they can only instruct the officers of another company (albeit wholly owned) to hand it over - to which the answer is "No, it would be illegal to do so".