Comparative Legal Strategies

As the international community has evolved to accommodate for the digital landscape, we have seen a variety of different strategies emerge between nations, which aim to address the dual-headed issue of data sovereignty and digital governance. Many jurisdictions are increasingly enacting laws and regulations governing how and where data must be stored either within their respective borders or abroad. What has resulted is a constantly evolving network of rules and restrictions for the location of data. As a result of a lack of definitions in legislation within the Americas region, as well as many authorities using the terms interchangeably, there is no definitive definition. However, conceptually we can define data residency as rules governing where a jurisdiction specifies their data must be stored geographically. On the other hand, data localisation can be defined generally as the rules which mandate that data created within a certain jurisdiction must be kept within the jurisdiction. In order to glean a better understanding of the various strategies used to accommodate political and governance frameworks onto our online realm, we can look to a handful of nations, as a sample of frameworks used to date to address these issues. In this chapter we will examine the different legislative solutions of sample of countries to compare the outcomes and strategies related to data sovereignty, consent and governance around the world. These will be detailed alphabetically.