ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to draw out the key elements of a messy and unarticulated premise from the Free Internet Coalition and offers a political coherent approach for how to counter the challenge that has emerged from the Cyber Sovereignty movement. Despite the aforementioned diplomatic weakness to the Cyber Sovereignty model, a level of credence is provided to its case from building opinion in international legal circles. Emerging opinion is that international law does indeed apply to activities in cyberspace, crucially with little need to amend existing provisions. Armed with the necessary understanding of international legal opinion on the place of sovereignty in cyberspace, focus can turn to a clear manifestation of how Cyber Sovereignty is developing, which is via data localisation legislation. Data localisation, very simply, ‘can be defined as the act of storing data on a device that is physically located within the country where the data was created.’
