Illegal for whom? If the server is connect to other servers abroad and the people abroad are the ones handing it over then no law in that country has been broken by the global cloud provider. The law might have been said to be broken when it was uploaded to the global cloud provider since that was when it was "handed over". So essentially that law would mandate regional or national clouds for whatever data you wanted to protect. Which isn't a bad thing. Except that everyone wants global information services.

A not bad outcome would be that Europeans use European only clouds for their private data and have their own services.

We already have those protections in the Constitution: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This is about situations where a warrant was issued based on probable cause.

Stop the war on drugs,

We are experimenting in a limited way with marijuana legalization. We'll see how it goes.

simplify the tax code

Harder said then done. The USA doesn't like lots of government direct investment in the economy so all sorts of adjustments have to occur via. taxes. When designing a tax code pick any 2: simple, meet societal objectives (fair), avoids widespread crony capitalism (honest).

Azure isn't foreign. The system, including the one in Ireland is run by a Washington state corporation. It is a fallacy that MOIL has total control.

I think it's fair to say the corporations are at least as worried about losing share in foreign markets, as with the preservation of our personal freedoms.
That said, we are mired in a controversy where corporations and citizens find their collective best interest on the same side.

Once it becomes USA government vs. EU Microsoft et al. doesn't have the same crazy situation that could exist if a USA warrant makes it a felony for Microsoft to not hand over data while EU privacy protections make it a crime to hand over that data. So I don't think everyone is on the same side. I think the corporations just want to be out of the middle of this spat between the USA and EU regarding conflicting laws.

Sure they would rather not lose marketshare to EU only providers. But EU only providers remember have no constitutional protections they are subject to having the CIA, NSA... collect whatever they want however they want without any warrants.

Under the current law your friends account in Albania is subject to US warrant regardless of what you do because Google operates in the USA. The new law means there has to be some US citizen or corp using the data for Google to be subject to the warrant. It is a slight tightening.

Would a customer, then, be more likely to buy a service from a Non-US service provider, as the privacy laws in the US are so porous?

Yes. If you want to violate USA law you should be using non-US providers to do it.

They have not as of yet implemented anything. I'm going to assume Microsoft's council is knowledgeable on this and they don't see the problem the European /.ers keep pointing to.

That's not a comparable situation. The comparable situation would be something like the Russian government regulating Radius. And that is appropriate.

Best case scenario would be a treaty with something like an Interpol web-service so a Maryland DA could go to a Maryland court show reasonable cause and have an order enforced in Spain. That takes the executive and the legislative branch working with foreign countries.

Worst case scenario would be a patchwork of laws with each countries having their own system and data moving freely between them, a race to the bottom. Which is pretty close to what most of the European /.ers and Microsoft wants.

A non-stable but not terrible situation would be US law being enforced de-facto against the wishes of people in foreign countries and their governments, i.e. the current administration's policy.

So I think what's good is this starts moving us towards the negotiations that need to take place. Europeans don't want murder for hire rings or human trafficking setting up in their countries either; they just have a legal framework designed to facilitate it because of privacy concerns. So I really do believe a good compromise is possible.

Well, except for the bump at "100 bpm or greater". I didn't realize so many squirrels read slashdot.

Well certainly anything that moves this from precedent and complexities of corporations winging it to black letter law would be a net gain. The role of search warrants and how to handle international issues should be between the USA government and the EU. Tech companies should just be following the law. I think everyone agrees the stored communication act (1986) needs updating

Now a few points:

Europeans keep citing European laws Microsoft's council has not been able to show that there was any Irish law in conflict with the previous warrants: Second, while many media reports have claimed that the decision was contrary to foreign privacy laws protecting the requested emails, it was clear from the transcript that Microsoft never raised such a conflict of law. (“Microsoft . . . has not been able to point to any specific provision of Irish law that in any way forbids it from handing the data over.”) Some commentators claimed that the data must be subject to foreign privacy protections because Ireland is part of the European Union, and thus the data must be subject to the European Data Protection Directive. However, what they failed to appreciate is that the European Data Protection Directive, by itself, is not legally binding. It needs to be ratified as national law by each member state. As a result, there are variations across the member states as to what is allowed and what is prohibited. Accordingly, the impact of an actual conflict of law on future warrants remains undecided.

Moreover the issue was always that USA people had control of the data: because Microsoft could access and retrieve the requested documents from a terminal within the United States, even though the actual search and retrieval would occur abroad, the data was still under Microsoft’s control in the United States, and thus properly subject to the SCA warrant.

Really? Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0. Yeah, it was a while ago and some things have improved, but most of the issues remain and I doubt another focus group study would find significantly different results.

The problem is that designing a UI that makes it easy for people who don't know anything about cryptography or security to achieve useful cryptographic security is really, really hard. Almost as hard as educating everyone about cryptography and security enough that they can achieve useful cryptographic security with PGP.

That's not true regarding frightening. The ones who get frightened can't find and don't use the advanced tab. There are two problems though with those tabs:

a) People tend to over estimate their level of knowledge and turn on these features too early. This can be avoided by making the advanced menus more intimidating (for example using technical terms).
b) Different user bases demand opposite goals. The contention can be quite hard to deal with and often the application either disadvantages one of the groups or effectively forks into multiple applications. In which case why not just have multiple applications?

Java did that years ago. Notice how it destroyed Microsoft?

More like 15 but yes. KDE aimed at being the first Linux GUI. Gnome is/was always more aggressive in being a GUI for end user rather than workstation computing.