THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.
My latest Locus Magazine column is "Hard (Sovereignty) Cases Make Bad (Internet) Law," an attempt to cut through the knots we tie ourselves in when speech and national sovereignty collide online:
This happens all the time. Indeed, the precipitating incident for my writing this column was someone commenting on the short-lived Brazilian court order blocking Twitter, opining that this was purely a matter of national sovereignty, with no speech dimension.
This is just profoundly wrong. Of course any rules about blocking a communications medium will have a free-speech dimension – how could it not? And of course any dispute relating to globe-spanning medium will have a national sovereignty dimension.
How could it not?
So if every internet fight is a speech fight and a sovereignty fight, which side should we root for? Here's my proposal: we should root for human rights.
In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the US government was illegally wiretapping the whole world. They were able to do this because the world is dominated by US-based tech giants and they shipped all their data stateside for processing. These tech giants secretly colluded with the NSA to help them effect this illegal surveillance (the "Prism" program) – and then the NSA stabbed them in the back by running another program ("Upstream") where they spied on the tech giants without their knowledge.
After the Snowden revelations, countries around the world enacted "data localization" rules that required any company doing business within their borders to keep their residents' data on domestic servers. Obviously, this has a human rights dimension: keeping your people's data out of the hands of US spy agencies is an important way to defend their privacy rights. which are crucial to their speech rights (you can't speak freely if you're being spied on).
So when the EU, a largely democratic bloc, enacted data localization rules, they were harnessing national soveriegnty in service to human rights.
But the EU isn't the only place that enacted data-localization rules. Russia did the same thing. Once again, there's a strong national sovereignty case for doing this. Even in the 2010s, the US and Russia were hostile toward one another, and that hostility has only ramped up since. Russia didn't want its data stored on NSA-accessible servers for the same reason the USA wouldn't want all its' people's data stored in GRU-accessible servers.
But Russia has a significantly poorer human rights record than either the EU or the USA (note that none of these are paragons of respect for human rights). Russia's data-localization policy was motivated by a combination of legitimate national sovereignty concerns and the illegitimate desire to conduct domestic surveillance in order to identify and harass, jail, torture and murder dissidents.
When you put it this way, it's obvious that national sovereignty is important, but not as important as human rights, and when they come into conflict, we should side with human rights over sovereignty.
Some more examples: Thailand's lesse majeste rules prohibit criticism of their corrupt monarchy. Foreigners who help Thai people circumvent blocks on reportage of royal corruption are violating Thailand's national sovereignty, but they're upholding human rights:
Saudi law prohibits criticism of the royal family; when foreigners help Saudi women's rights activists evade these prohibitions, we violate Saudi sovereignty, but uphold human rights:
In other words, "sovereignty, yes; but human rights even moreso."
Which brings me back to the precipitating incidents for the Locus column: the arrest of billionaire Telegram owner Pavel Durov in France, and the blocking of billionaire Elon Musk's Twitter in Brazil.
How do we make sense of these? Let's start with Durov. We still don't know exactly why the French government arrested him (legal systems descended from the Napoleonic Code are weird). But the arrest was at least partially motivated by a demand that Telegram conform with a French law requiring businesses to have a domestic agent to receive and act on takedown demands.
Not every takedown demand is good. When a lawyer for the Sackler family demanded that I take down criticism of his mass-murdering clients, that was illegitimate. But there is such a thing as a legitimate takedown: leaked financial information, child sex abuse material, nonconsensual pornography, true threats, etc, are all legitimate targets for takedown orders. Of course, it's not that simple. Even if we broadly agree that this stuff shouldn't be online, we don't necessarily agree whether something fits into one of these categories.
This is true even in categories with the brightest lines, like child sex abuse material:
But just because not every takedown is a just one, it doesn't follow that every takedown is unjust. The idea that companies should have domestic agents in the countries where they operate isn't necessarily oppressive. If people who sell hamburgers from a street-corner have to register a designated contact with a regulator, why not someone who operates a telecoms network with 900m global users?
Of course, requirements to have a domestic contact can also be used as a prelude to human rights abuses. Countries that insist on a domestic rep are also implicitly demanding that the company place one of its employees or agents within reach of its police-force.
Just as data localization can be a way to improve human rights (by keeping data out of the hands of another country's lawless spy agencies) or to erode them (by keeping data within reach of your own country's lawless spy agencies), so can a requirement for a local agent be a way to preserve the rule of law (by establishing a conduit for legitimate takedowns) or a way to subvert it (by giving the government hostages they can use as leverage against companies who stick up for their users' rights).
In the case of Durov and Telegram, these issues are especially muddy. Telegram bills itself as an encrypted messaging app, but that's only sort of true. Telegram does not encrypt its group-chats, and even the encryption in its person-to-person messaging facility is hard to use and of dubious quality.
This is relevant because France – among many other governments – has waged a decades-long war against encrypted messaging, which is a wholly illegitimate goal. There is no way to make an encrypted messaging tool that works against bad guys (identity thieves, stalkers, corporate and foreign spies) but not against good guys (cops with legitimate warrants). Any effort to weaken end-to-end encrypted messaging creates broad, significant danger for every user of the affected service, all over the world. What's more, bans on end-to-end encrypted messaging tools can't stand on their own – they also have to include blocks of much of the useful internet, mandatory spyware on computers and mobile devices, and even more app-store-like control over which software you can install:
So when the French state seizes Durov's person and demands that he establish the (pretty reasonable) minimum national presence needed to coordinate takedown requests, it can seem like this is a case where national sovereignty and human rights are broadly in accord.
But when you consider that Durov operates a (nominally) encrypted messaging tool that bears some resemblance to the kinds of messaging tools the French state has been trying to sabotage for decades, and continues to rail against, the human rights picture gets rather dim.
That is only slightly mitigated by the fact that Telegram's encryption is suspect, difficult to use, and not applied to the vast majority of the communications it serves. So where do we net out on this? In the Locus column, I sum things up this way:
Telegram should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and
those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and
Telegram should not backdoor its encryption, even if
the sovereign French state orders it to do so.
Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even moreso.
What about Musk? As with Durov in France, the Brazilian government demanded that Musk appoint a Brazilian representative to handle official takedown requests. Despite a recent bout of democratic backsliding under the previous regime, Brazil's current government is broadly favorable to human rights. There's no indication that Brazil would use an in-country representative as a hostage, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with requiring foreign firms doing business in your country to have domestic representatives.
Musk's response was typical: a lawless, arrogant attack on the judge who issued the blocking order, including thinly veiled incitements to violence.
The Brazilian state's response was multi-pronged. There was a national blocking order, and a threat to penalize Brazilians who used VPNs to circumvent the block. Both measures have obvious human rights implications. For one thing, the vast majority of Brazilians who use Twitter are engaged in the legitimate exercise of speech, and they were collateral damage in the dispute between Musk and Brazil.
More serious is the prohibition on VPNs, which represents a broad attack on privacy-enhancing technology with implications far beyond the Twitter matter. Worse still, a VPN ban can only be enforced with extremely invasive network surveillance and blocking orders to app stores and ISPs to restrict access to VPN tools. This is wholly disproportionate and illegitimate.
But that wasn't the only tactic the Brazilian state used. Brazilian corporate law is markedly different from US law, with fewer protections for limited liability for business owners. The Brazilian state claimed the right to fine Musk's other companies for Twitter's failure to comply with orders to nominate a domestic representative. Faced with fines against Spacex and Tesla, Musk caved.
In other words, Brazil had a legitimate national sovereignty interest in ordering Twitter to nominate a domestic agent, and they used a mix of somewhat illegitimate tactics (blocking orders), extremely illegitimate tactics (threats against VPN users) and totally legitimate tactics (fining Musk's other companies) to achieve these goals.
As I put it in the column:
Twitter should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and
those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and
banning Twitter is bad for the free speech rights of Twitter users in Brazil; and
banning VPNs is bad for all Brazilian internet users; and
it’s hard to see how a Twitter ban will be effective without bans on VPNs.
There's no such thing as an internet policy fight that isn't about national sovereignty and speech, and when the two collide, we should side with human rights over sovereignty. Sovereignty isn't a good unto itself – it's only a good to the extent that is used to promote human rights.
In other words: "Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even moreso."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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The sales office to data localization pipeline for mass surveillance.
Enter American culture-war nonsense.
In Texas, they want to ban websites that explain how to get an abortion, as well as sites that ship the pills for a medication abortion. In Florida, they want to force bloggers who write about the state government to pay a fee and register with the state, prohibiting anonymous commentary about the state legislature and its actions. Florida has also required that online providers cease permitting their users to display pronouns other than the ones they were assigned at birth. Of course, online services have no way to know what pronouns any of their users were assigned at birth, so sites like Github are complying with Florida law by simply not displaying pronouns to Floridian users.
The biggest barrier to enforcing these laws is the US Constitution, which these laws assuredly violate. It’s entirely possible that a lower court will uphold these laws. It’s conceivable that an appeals court will do so as well. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the current Supreme Court — illegitimately stacked with far-right partisan hacks lacking any shred of principle — will follow suit.
But it’s far from a sure thing. It’s not even clear whether the legislatures that passed these laws and the governors who signed them want them to be enforced. After all, if these policies do come into force, large numbers of corporations are likely to shutter their offices and move out of state (especially in Florida, an increasingly economic irrelevance for any business not engaged in selling soon-to-be-drowned condos and/or shitcoins).
For these cynical political operators, having their laws overturned by “activist judges” lets them eat their cake and have it too — they don’t have to alienate the business lobby, and they get a steady supply of red meat for their cruel base, driving voter turnout and donations from frightened bigots.
The sales office to data localization pipeline for mass surveillance.
National firewalls are everywhere today. Sometimes, they’re sold as turnkey solutions — by both Chinese and western firms — to poor countries with very little technical capacity of their own. Spy agencies from large, powerful countries love it when poor countries install foreign-made national firewalls, as these are key to “third-party collection” (when a spy agency taps into another spy agency’s files) and “fourth-party collection” (when a spy agency taps into another spy agency that has tapped into another spy-agency’s files).
As national firewalls proliferate, so too do enforcement nexuses. After Edward Snowden revealed that US tech giants were allowing US spy agencies to plunder their user data, the EU imposed a (perfectly reasonable) data localization regulation that required US tech companies to keep Europeans’ data on servers within the EU (this regulation remains contentious and fragile).
The EU doesn’t have a regional or national firewall, so tech giants who don’t want to comply with the regulation could simply withdraw their sales offices and engineering departments and lobbyists from the EU and ignore the rule — at least to the extent that they could convince US courts not to enforce EU judgments against them.
But the EU has other enforcement nexuses it could rely upon. It could order European banks and payment processors to block payments to tech firms that ignore the localization rule. Payment processing remains a highly regulated, concentrated industry, and even if, say, Facebook was willing to give up on 520,000,000 European consumers by retreating to the USA, it’s unlikely that Visa and Mastercard would follow suit.
The sales office to data localization pipeline for mass surveillance.
Call this the “enforcement nexus” — for a government to enforce a law, it needs something to seize. Governments have broad latitude to seize things and people within their territorial borders (though this is not absolute, as I’ll discuss below).
But when it comes to conduct outside a government’s territory, enforcement depends upon the cooperation of another government — this is why so many crime dramas turn on a desperate dash for countries that don’t have extradition treaties.
Governments can project enforcement power into any territory that will allow it to seize the people or property of its adversaries. When the Argentinian government defaulted on its bonds, it failed to reckon with the fact that its US dollar holdings were stashed in the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York.
That meant that the vulture capitalists seeking to squeeze Argentina could argue their case in their home court in the USA, seeking a judgment that could be enforced domestically — that is, by seizing the Argentinian government’s assets held on US soil.
Sustainable Innovation in the Southeast Asia Data Center Market Segment
The Southeast Asia Hyperscale Data Center Market is currently a laboratory for some of the world's most innovative sustainable building practices. Because the region is characterized by high humidity and year-round heat, traditional air-based cooling systems are often inefficient and costly to run. This challenge has forced operators to pioneer new cooling solutions, such as direct-to-chip liquid cooling and even underwater data center trials in the waters around Singapore. These technologies not only reduce the energy required for cooling but also allow for much higher server densities, maximizing the output of every square foot of floor space. Southeast Asia Hyperscale Data Center Market recorded a value of USD 12,900 million in 2024 and is estimated to reach a value of USD 89,683 million by 2033 with a CAGR of 26.3% during the forecast period.
A deep dive into SEA Hyperscale Data Center Market operational trends reveals that water conservation is becoming as important as energy efficiency. Hyperscale facilities often require millions of gallons of water for evaporative cooling, which can put a strain on local resources in water-stressed areas. To mitigate this, many new builds are incorporating "closed-loop" cooling systems that recycle water and use advanced filtration to minimize waste. Some operators are even experimenting with using desalinated seawater or reclaimed industrial water to reduce their reliance on municipal supplies. This commitment to resource stewardship is essential for maintaining the "social license to operate" in communities that are sensitive to the environmental impact of large-scale industrial projects.
The use of modular construction techniques is another significant trend that is helping to reduce the environmental impact of new hyperscale builds. By pre-fabricating server rooms and power modules in a controlled factory environment, developers can reduce construction waste and significantly shorten the time required to bring a new facility online. This "lego-like" approach to building allows for more precise material usage and better quality control, leading to more energy-efficient buildings. In a region where rapid urbanization is putting a premium on land and construction labor, the efficiency gains of modular building are a major driver for the market. This innovative approach is allowing Southeast Asia to scale its digital infrastructure faster than almost any other region in the world.
Furthermore, the integration of edge data centers into the hyperscale ecosystem is helping to reduce the overall energy required to move data across the network. By processing data closer to where it is generated—such as in a smart factory or a 5G tower—edge facilities reduce the load on the massive hyperscale hubs and lower the overall network latency. This distributed architecture is more energy-efficient and provides a more responsive experience for users of real-time applications like augmented reality and autonomous transport. The synergy between massive central hubs and nimble edge sites is a defining characteristic of the modern Southeast Asian data landscape. This holistic view of network efficiency is a major reason why the region is attracting so much interest from global technology leaders.
As we look toward 2033, the focus on "circularity" in the data center lifecycle will likely become a major theme. This involves everything from using recycled steel in construction to ensuring that old servers and batteries are recycled or repurposed rather than sent to landfills. Many major operators are already setting "zero-waste-to-landfill" targets for their global operations and are working with local partners to build robust e-waste recycling networks. This focus on the full lifecycle of the facility ensures that the digital revolution in Southeast Asia is as sustainable as it is transformative. The journey toward a truly green hyperscale market is well underway, and the innovations being developed here will likely set the standard for tropical data center operations worldwide.
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PP Tunas Compliance Checklist 2026: Cara Lolos Aturan Konten AI Indonesia
PP Tunas Compliance Checklist 2026: Cara Lolos Aturan Konten AI Indonesia
Regulasi digital Indonesia makin ketat di 2026. PP Tunas No. 12/2026 yang efektif sejak 28 Maret bukan cuma soal blokir TikTok/YouTube untuk user di bawah 16 tahun—ada mandat labeling konten AI yang wajib dipatuhi semua platform digital beroperasi di Indonesia.
Artikel ini adalah checklist praktis untuk developer, startup,…
