by Paul De Hert and Johannes Thumfart

This paper will be published as P. De Hert & J. Thumfart, ‘The Microsoft Ireland case and the cyberspace sovereignty trilemma. Post-territorial technologies and companies question territorial state sovereignty and regulatory state monopolies’ in B. Hess & C. Kuner (eds.), Jurisdiction, Conflict of Law and Data Protection in Cyberspace, Nomos, 2018.

ABSTRACT

The Microsoft Ireland case brought before the Supreme Court in 2018 and dropped the very same year has attracted attention world-wide from policymakers and scholars. This contribution focusses on two important features of the case: the conflicting and often chaotic approaches to the notion of sovereignty of many of the players and the remarkable move of a private company to trigger regulation in a world where companies, technologies, data flows and governments transgress borders with growing acceptance of the inadequacy of older territorial comprehensions of the world order.

Keywords:  sovereignty, territoriality, cyberspace, Microsoft Ireland case, cyber sovereignty, Internet