“The United States’ global trade representative has strongly criticised a perceived preference on the part of large Australian organisations for hosting their data on-shore in Australia, claiming it created a significant trade barrier for US technology firms and was based on a misinterpretation of the US Patriot Act.” It is somewhat entertaining that Australian citizens are apparently more concerned about the crazy Patriot Act (the name alone is hurl-inducing) than US citizens are.
The US sure seems awfully concerned about a foreign company. Too bad they don’t show that much concern for their own domestic companies.
They’re not concerned about a foreign company, they’re concerned that someone put a wrench in the “fuck your local companies and businesses, buy our stuff” machinery.
Maybe US citizens (and others) should/are choosing to host their data in Australia to avoid the Patriot Act.
Ok, so realistically Australia wouldn’t be my first choice for some technical reasons, such as geographic location leading to high latency and not having direct links to countries the majority of my users are in.
Still, the US should learn to more seriously consider the implications to commerce of items designed to “protect”.
As an individual, if I wanted excellent protection against sickness I should avoid all contact with living organisms and live in a cave. For starters, total isolation makes it hard to live (food). And, if per chance I did have contact with another human, I would almost certainly contract some common bacterial/viral infection and die from it. The irony here being that increased protection can result in increased risk from the very thing you are trying to guard against.
Fear drives many illogical, ineffective beahviours. And, although we may have nothing to fear but fear itself, I worry about the actions taken by others as a consequence of their fears.
Edited 2012-04-13 16:56 UTC
I can’t think of a more Patriotic Act than that.
😉
-Hack
The Australians have correctly assessed the impact of the US Patriot Act.
claiming it created a significant trade barrier for US technology firms
How about US technology firms pull their head out of their backside and stop boycotting the rest of the world by refusing to:
1) Sell products to consumers outside of the United States – you’ve got an online store, there are courier services, and mention on the order, “the customer is repsonsible for all taxes, duties or charges imposed by the countries government being imported into” and voila problem solved.
2) Offer US consumer deals but then tell non-US based customers to go f-ck themselves and offer them nothing. If you’re operating on the belief that the US is the centre of the world then quite frankly you and your company deserve to crash and burn.
Once again we see the US whining about being ‘misunderstood’ – can’t wait till the patriotic winbags start down voting this post.
Edited 2012-04-13 17:54 UTC
“Fear causes panic. And panic will cause your worst fears to come true.”
Its fairly obvious to everyone but us. We will not follow our own rules when it comes to security if we think the ends justify the means. We reap what we sow.
Everyone need to off-shore more parts of their business, especially U.S companies should off-shore more jobs to South-East Asia. It really stimulates the growth over here.
Wait, that’s not what they mean?
The truth is that there in a tariff on foreign data. That embedded tariff goes against trade agreements.
How silly of the US to expect them to comply with fair trade!
American’s want ‘energy independence’.
Many countries want ‘technological independence’.
It goes by lots of names. All to avoid ‘free-trade’. Everyone likes to have free-trade to export. But few want to face the imports and loss of industries.
They will use whatever excuses they want. Most of it is just excuses. It’s all about protecting things from free-trade.
Not saying we should or shouldn’t have free-trade. But that’s just how the game is played.
Data pipes between the east and the west are pretty bad. So it actually makes a lot of sense Australia hosting their data locally: more bandwidth, lower latency, etc. Stuff like that matters when using cloud solutions.
Edited 2012-04-14 08:44 UTC
So its OK for some US companies to insist their data remains on US soil and only administered by US citizens?
What a silly US Trade Representative they have, perhaps someone should teach her/him a little logic, perhaps explain a little about “too much latency gives us a shirt service” and the fact we don’t trust them with anything of ours.
It’s a free market. They should be happy.