Comment by shadowgovt
3 years ago
Building out the infrastructure necessary for Cloud to be compliant with region-stored data was a multi-year project.
Huge swathes of Google's architecture (especially its legacy architecture) have deeply-ingrained location-agnosticism assumptions. It turns out to be extremely complex and expensive to remove those assumptions given the way Google handles data once it hits their datacenter fabric.
(Not impossible, mind, just that this assertion that it wouldn't be that hard to do is in "I could build Twitter in a weekend" territory).
It’s coming up to a decade since Schrems I, six years since GDPR, and four years since enforcement of GDPR. For a company like Google the writing has been on the wall for a lot longer than a weekend. They’ve simply been gambling that they can get away with it, and now that argument is collapsing.
Oh, no doubt. They've 100% been gambling that they could get away with it. The GDPR has deviated increasingly from what their leadership assumed would be a reasonable position (it continues to drift from the American centroid belief on who owns what data; for Americans, the notion that you can use other people's computers without them keeping records of how you used their computers is kinda weird, and Americans lack the direct historical experience to have the kinds of concerns about mass-citizen-tracking that Europe does).
My prediction is that as things move forward, they're going to find it isn't worth their money to offer Analytics for European customers if the GDPR continues to make that more onerous (especially since the monetization story of Analytics for Google is so threadbare) and just offer it for customers in other countries while Europe does its own thing. Win-win.