The Era of Borderless Data Is Ending

The information pings around the world at the speed of a click, becoming a kind of borderless currency that underpins the digital economy. Largely unregulated, the flow of bits and bytes helped fuel the rise of transnational megacompanies like Google and Amazon and reshaped global communications, commerce, entertainment and media. Now the era of open borders for data is ending. France, Austria, South Africa and more than 50 other countries are accelerating efforts to control the digital information produced by their citizens, government agencies and corporations. Driven by security and privacy concerns, as well as economic interests and authoritarian and nationalistic urges, governments are increasingly setting rules and standards about how data can and cannot move around the globe. The goal is to gain “digital sovereignty.” While countries like China have long cordoned off their digital ecosystems, the imposition of more national rules on information flows represents a fundamental shift in the democratic world and alters how the internet has operated since it became widely commercialized in the 1990s.