U.S. knocks plans for European communication network (opens in new tab)

"The United States on Friday criticized proposals to build a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States, warning that such rules could breach international trade laws."

I believe cooperate espionage is also against international trade laws. You can't claim it's against the law if you have shown to completely ignore it yourself.

If that is against a trade law, then the trade law has to go.

Having the ability to easily spy on us is not a free market principle.

Also, you shouldn't try to gain goodwill by bullying tactics and strawmen. How is this measure a tactic against American companies when it also explicitly bypasses the United Kingdom?

They are speaking of keeping all traffic from continental Europe to continental Europe within continental Europe, away from the NSA _and_ GCHQ.

I think building out national/region specific networks and services is a good thing. I'd probably be more willing to use SaaS products if I could absolutely guarantee that my traffic, personal details and my data never left my country.

Why? Because I actually have some chance of making the business accountable. We have things like the Privacy Act and Consumer Guarantees Act. Not only that, but there is a massively smaller barrier to entry to do things like take them to small claims court.

If a US based company sells my data or just hands it over to the NSA, I have no course of action. It's just "fuck you, read the TOS". Even if those Terms of Service literally go against established local laws.

Note that I'm not talking about content filtering or blocking international traffic. Just removing the huge reliance on international services and infrastructure, that doesn't have to mean cutting the cord.

Unfortunately the Internet isn't a net in the sense envisioned by the originators. It is mostly star connected hubs with a few backbone connections. Building an actual network would be good for the end users but unfortunately it seems that this sort of freedom is not what is being proposed. What we should really have is end to end encryption under user control. Then it would not matter what the route was but of course none of our political masters, Merkel included, are willing to promote our freedom at the expense of the freedom of the state to spy on us.