THE "TEMPTATIONS" OF THE EUROPEAN AND NATIONAL CLOUD: AMID POLITICAL SIMPLIFICATION AND LEGAL CRITICISM

Abstract

The race to create local cloud solutions has become a constant in the digital development programs of member States. Italy is promoting the establishment of the so-called "national cloud", and Germany and France have been working for some time on the Gaia-X project. At European level, the development of cloud computing is taking a strategic role, at least for the immediate future. The declared objective is to free us from solutions that today are almost entirely dependent on infrastructures made available by international providers. Contributing to the debate - more by superimposition than composition - there are broadly geopolitical motivations, aspirations to global technological predominance and concerns associated with personal data protection for third party interference due to the extraterritorial application of foreign legislation. The recent "Schrems II" ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, and previously, but with less impact in the broader public, the results of the joint EDPB (European Data Protection Board)-EDPS (European Data Protection Supervisor) study on the United States' Cloud Act, have forced the question of the international acquisition of personal data flows (and non-personal, we may add) and the associated assurances. This paper intends to offer an analysis of the subject, aimed above all at unravelling the multiple levels of the questions raised, which touch not only on legal but on political matters and give an initial, reasoned census of the various bodies of applicable law. Above and beyond hard-hitting declarations, we need to determine to what point the independence of a local European cloud is effectively possible or desirable compared to non-EU providers and, in more concrete terms, to what point an autonomous solution is economically and technically practicable in terms of services that are essential for the States, and that enable the exercise of other fundamental rights and freedoms, for individuals, and therefore must not be susceptible to impairment or ...