Google Pushes Back Against Data Localization

The big technology companies have put forth a united front when it comes to pushing back against the government after revelations of mass surveillance. But their cooperation goes only so far. Microsoft suggested that it would deepen its existing efforts to allow customers to store their data near them and outside the United States. Google, for its part, has been fighting this notion of so-called data localization.

“If data localization and other efforts are successful, then what we will face is the effective Balkanization of the Internet and the creation of a ‘splinternet’ broken up into smaller national and regional pieces, with barriers around each of the splintered Internets to replace the global Internet we know today,” Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security, told a congressional panel in November. Microsoft and other tech companies are trying to prevent foreign customers from switching to services outside the United States. In the next three years, the cloud computing industry could lose $180 billion, 25 percent of its revenue, because of such defections, according to Forrester, a research company. Yet even though Google faces these same risks and requests from foreign customers, its policy position is for surveillance reform instead of data localization, according to a person briefed on Google’s policy who would speak only anonymously.