> Provide data to companies from an untrustworthy nation? Nah - Europeans1.
> 1. Those who understand the issues and actually give a damn, anyway - which, sadly, is probably not enough to matter.
Ah, but in most cases it won't be just down to the users actually understanding. Take FarceBork for example - they have a big business in Europe. Unless they stop illegally slurping data then they can be up in court and fined worthwhile money - enough to actually hurt them. So what are their options :
1) They could pull out of Europe and have no presence here, none at all. But then they'd lose a heck of a lot of income from EU based advertisers and so on. But having no presence here would put them out of reach of EU authorities.
That raises a question, would it be illegal (or perhaps made illegal) for an EU based entity to trade with them ? That's what did for Radio Caroline - the authorities couldn't touch them while they were in international waters, but they did cut off the advertising income. Or could the EU authorities tackle the export by having the internet carries block FarceBork traffic ?
2) They could restructure their operations so as to keep EU data out of the reach of US authorities. That's what I think they'll do - it'll cost them in various ways (such as not being able to mine global data as one big resource), but it's completely doable.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
