extraterritorial : In a virtual world where in a split second data are transferred to and processed in far-flung corners of the world, national regulators may be at loss as to how to ground their jurisdiction. Indeed, due to these spatio-temporal shifts, the principle of territoriality, the traditional cornerstone of the law of jurisdiction, appears to be losing its salience in the field of international data protection. Where data are everywhere and become disconnected from physical territory, extraterritoriality may seem the only viable regulatory option. Unbounded extraterritoriality, however, has serious adverse consequences for both businesses and states. For businesses, regulatory burdens imposed by multiple states might increase transaction costs and legal uncertainty, while vigorous assertions of extraterritorial jurisdiction could cause international competency conflicts between different states, which might have different substantive views on the scope of data protection. (†2641)
extraterritorial : The EU Court of Justice's 2014 affirmation of EU data subjects’ ‘right to erasure’ (under certain conditions) with respect to search results generated by US-based search engine Google, and the resulting tug of war over the geographical scope of implementation of the judgment, is one of the most conspicuous examples of the extraterritorial effect of EU data protection law, and the controversy such effect can stir. (†2642)
