When huge international communications networks are created, one of the most common problems that needs to be addressed is privacy. Just last week, several American “Tech Giants” made moves to ensure that their international clients are protected in this sense. Amazon and Google both recently announced that they would create data centers and expand cloud-computing infrastructure in European countries like France, Britain and the Netherlands. Part of the reason for this is due to pressure from the European Union, which has expressed concerns that Silicon Valley companies are using and abusing their citizen’s digital information. The answer to this conflict is to move data and cloud-computing centers to Europe; when EU citizens’ digital information is in their own backyard, it allows those countries to have more control over their own data.

The EU has done a lot of negotiating over the past few years as it develops higher privacy standards to protect its citizens. As scandals involving the NSA arise, leading Americans and Europeans to question whether their personal information is being monitored online, European countries have cracked down on privacy policies involving U.S. companies.

As communications infrastructures grow in countries throughout Europe, U.S. companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple will continue in their path towards international dominance. In conclusion, it will take some fine tuning to make sure that data centers and cloud-computing providers comply with the restrictions that the EU has set forth, but in the end, these American companies have far more to gain.