Europe Aims to Regulate the Cloud

Even before revelations this summer by Edward J. Snowden on the extent of spying by the National Security Agency on electronic communications, the European Parliament busied itself attaching amendments to its data privacy regulation. Several would change the rules of cloud computing, the technology that enables the sharing of software and files among computers on the Internet. And since the news broke of widespread monitoring by the United States spy agency, cloud computing has become one of the regulatory flash points in Brussels as a debate ensued over how to protect data from snooping American eyes. The European Union wants to regulate the cloud even if that makes its use more complicated.