It stops just short of saying that you must do thispreemptively, but is pretty clear that you must do it if they ask you to.

And as the Americans are choosing to interfere in European domestic politics and trample their own laws and constitution the more scrutiny their requests will get.

It was the MLAT thing that the various civil liberties groups object to (I'll cover the problems with those down below). There was very little objection to the first part.

The first part was not controversial because pretty much every country has something equivalent (for reasons I'll cover below), as did the US except specifically in the case of data covered by the SCA due to poor drafting.

One of the big reasons for the SCA was created was the emerging "third party doctrine" meant that instead of having to get a warrant or subpoena against you to get your data they could simply subpoena it from any of your service providers that had it. The SCA made it so the third party doctrine subpoenas would not apply to stored communications.

There were still cases where the government would need to compel the service provider to turn over the data. They wanted something with the probable cause requirements of a warrant but the delivery method of a subpoena. (A subpoena asks someone who controls the data to turn a copy over. A warrant is for when the government wants to raid the data center and seize the data. Since that involves the government directly acting where the data is located it only applies to someplace where they have jurisdiction).

So they created a new thing, the SCA warrant. The called it a "warrant" because it had the probable cause requirements of a warrant, but neglected to add something saying that in other respects it functions like a subpoena. I'll call this a pseudo-warrant.

The SCA was not the first pseudo-warrant. That would be the warrants under the Wiretap Act of 1968. Territoriality questions did not arise under that because by its nature the data it sought copies of was always in the US.

With the SCA the data might not necessarily be in the US. Years later Microsoft argued that because it is a "warrant" it should have the territorial restrictions that normal warrants have. The CLOUD Act clarified that it was indeed supposed to be like a subpoena as far as territoriality goes.

There have been some more pseudo-warrants created since then, but their drafters learned from the SCA and made sure the original legislation was clear on just what they were.

The reason pretty much every country has something like that, going back well before online documents, is because not having such a thing leads to big problems. If anyone in the country could shield documents from subpoenas (or whatever the equivalent is called in that country) by merely storing them across a border every company with documents that it needs to keep but that might be incriminating later would get sent to a storage facility across a border as soon as they were no longer actively using them.

For example as soon as a car company in Detroit releases a new car all the documents where during development engineers brought up safety concerns which management decided to not address would be sent across the bridge to a storage facility in Canada.

With electronic documents it is even easier. You would not have to wait until you aren't actively using the documents to stick them outside the country. Just stick your file server across a border and make sure you only have copies in country when someone is actively reading or editing them.

And so pretty much everywhere subpoenas compel someone in the country who controls the documents to fetch them (or copies) and turn them over. The actual location of the documents is completely irrelevant.

The thing that was worrying about the CLOUD Act was the MLAT provisions. MLATs are treaties where the participating countries agree on law enforcement. They include things like sharing information and cooperating on investigations. Normally these are enacted just like any other treaty. The executive branch negotiates them and then the Senate votes on ratification.

The CLOUD Act adds an expedited process where the Attorney General and the Secretary of State can sign an MLAT. Congress is not involved. These agreements allow foreign law enforcement to make requests directly to US service providers instead of going through the diplomatic channels normal MLAT requests go through, and they allow them access to stored communications that the SCA would normally block.

There are some safeguards. The foreign government is not supposed to intentionally target US people who are in the US and are not not supposed to use the data they get to infringe freedom of expression. There's also a 180 day window before these executive MLATs take effect during which Congress can block them by passing a joint resolution to do so.

Civil rights groups and many others were not impressed with those safeguards.

Like, the critical problem with the AWS sovereign pitch is that you must believe that they won’t give the keys to the US, and they also won’t give the source code that’s hosted in the US to the government either for them to find vulnerabilities in. I don’t know if that’s good enough unless you just need the data to stay in the EU and you don’t care if another country sees it.

I know they probably did some work on it (what if primary AWS goes rogue and the EU entity must work without it) but I don’t know if they explained how they’re safe to the public.

What? Those are US companies, they will have to give out your data under the Cloud Act. Only Schwarz and SAP are free from that by being German companies.

Similar happened already with OVH Canada vs France.

> In an affidavit, Xavier Barriere, corporate counsel at OVH in Paris, describes the dramatic situation: If the important proponent of European data sovereignty were to comply with the Canadian order, those responsible in France would be committing a criminal offense. They face up to six months in prison and fines of up to 90,000 euros per violation. However, if OVH ignores the Canadian court, it faces contempt of court proceedings in Ontario, which can also lead to severe sanctions.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Canadian-Court-OVHcloud-from-Fr...

And one comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060903

https://thenextweb.com/news/airbus-scaleway-aws-sovereign-cl...

And many others besides, pretty much every company I've looked at in the last year is either acutely aware of the problem or they are already executing on it. With Trump and his merry band of criminals repeatedly stating they're going to take Greenland by force you can't blame them either, that would effectively put the EU on a war footing with the United States (I still can't believe I'm writing this sort of thing and it is not entirely fiction), the end result of that would be that there would be an absolute run on EU hosted capacity. They're just trying to beat the rush and hope they'll never be proven to be right.

Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415217 - June 2026 (235 comments)

Netherlands reaches deal with European cloud company to decrease U.S. tech reliance - https://nltimes.nl/2026/04/24/netherlands-reaches-deal-europ... - April 24th, 2026

Wary of US Big Tech, the EU looks to build its “EuroStack” - https://sherwood.news/world/wary-of-us-big-tech-the-eu-looks... - March 18th, 2026

Why European Companies Are Leaving US Cloud Providers in 2026 — And Where They're Going - https://massivegrid.com/blog/european-companies-leaving-us-c... - March 12th, 2026

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech - https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/12/22/europe-gets-... - December 22nd, 2025

Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack - https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/10/15/schleswig-ho... - October 15th, 2025

EU Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments)

https://european-alternatives.eu/

https://euro-stack.com/

https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-oia/cloud-act-agre...

Source: I founded FastMail.

Fastmail used to be based in Melbourne only, but after the Pobox merger it ended up with an office in Philadelphia too. No idea how the balance of things is between the offices now.