Microsoft pledged not to intervene like that again, reclassifying its legal interpretation of its own services, and added language to its contracts to guarantee that it would fight future US attempts to do so:
When the US manages to force Microsoft to do something, it responds by trying to protect itself from the same scenario in the future. Because it wants profits. The ICC leaving Microsoft is the last thing Microsoft wanted.
None of that has anything to do with whether Microsoft is trying to assist the government. The cloud companies are doing what they can to protect themselves against these government actions.
> The cloud companies are doing what they can to protect themselves against these government actions.
No, they are doing what they can to convince customers that they are trying to protect themselves against government actions.
In fact its all smoke and mirrors. See the second link. AWS have admitted that the Cloud Act does allow the US government to compel access to French data.
Lengthy contracts between nation-states and corporations, developed and reviewed by teams of lawyers, and enforced by judges, are not exactly "pinky promises."
They will become pinky promises, once Microsoft gets ordered to do something by orange man or some three letters. There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US. It basically doesn't matter what they have in contracts, as US law or just political power with access to enforce that power trumps (ha) any contracts they can sign.
> There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US.
Actually there is, that's what the entire point of the sovereign clouds are. They reside physically in Europe, with legal control by Europeans, and European employees that can't be bossed around by the US. If the US orders Amazon to retrieve data from S3 servers located in a European sovereign cloud, Amazon employees in the US don't have the technical capability to do so, and the European data center employees are legally bound not to.
If those employees were working in a vacuum, then sure, but in reality they are not.
Employees have bosses and those bosses have bosses, and those bosses have bosses in the US. If not direct bosses, then at least people higher up in the context of all of Microsoft, who can pull strings, criticize them, categorize them as unreliable, and make their life hard, or even bring into motion that they are made to give up their position or are let go. Most people don't want a hard life at the job and be bullied. It is likely, that people joining Microsoft don't have the strongest moral compass anyway, so them sticking their neck out for European data protection, and losing what comfy life they have, including probably exceptional ...
Company politics are not to be underestimated. The question becomes who selects and vetoes higher ups in those sovereign clouds.
European governments cannot trust US companies, even when they have inner-EU parts, because influence from the US cannot be rules out.
"Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty:
Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled – however unlikely – to pass local customer info to US admin"
No, you have it 100% backwards. I'm saying Microsoft is incentivized to not allow interference, and this is strengthened by the fact that when a government forced interference, it took steps to strengthen itself against future interference.
So in light of that actual evidence, yes I am calling it conspiracy thinking to suggest that Microsoft has built in some kind of kill switch to make it easier for the government to do things that are against its corporate interest. Because that's literally what it is -- imagining some kind of conspiracy where Microsoft wants to help the US government, instead of its own bottom line.
Explain to me what's problematic about that?
And whatever you think about the arguments on either side, snark is absolutely a problem on HN. We can't have civil, productive discussions with it, and if you say it's "the least problematic thing here", then that's part of the problem too. Let's be better than that, how about?
There's zero evidence that Microsoft could shut down computers across a nation. Zilch. Nada. None.
Meanwhile, OP asserted they are "sure" Microsoft could do it at the "flick of a switch". Under orders from the US government.
That's absurd. If that's not conspiracy thinking, I don't know what is. A literal conspiracy between the two entities. When something is actually conspiracy thinking, you're allowed to label it as such, you know? You're trying to police ideas here, and that's entirely inappropriate. Be better.
They can (and will) switch off individual accounts from the US if the government asks them, and this has been demonstrated earlier this year.
No, they haven’t coded a “country-wide kill kill-switch” but having the ability to kill individual accounts, and being in a jurisdiction that demands accounts to be disabled from time to time is equivalent to having such a thing.
Also: Remember that several US organizations, including Github, have disabled thousands of accounts from eg Iran in the past is such maneuvers.
So: definitely feasible and has definitely happened in the past, with or without the mythical kill switch you talk of.
Also, how about less snark about the "news in my jurisdiction"? Since the first amendment provides more press freedoms than many European countries have.
