The Microsoft Ireland case, the cloud act and the cyberspace sovereignty trilemma: Post-territorial technologies and companies question regulatory state monopolies

The Microsoft Ireland case brought before the Supreme Court in 2018 and dropped the very same year has attracted attention world-wide from policymakers and scholars. This contri- bution focusses on two important features of the case: the conflicting and often chaotic ap- proaches to the notion of sovereignty of many of the players and the remarkable move of a private company to trigger regulation in a world where companies, technologies, data flows and governments transgress borders with growing acceptance of the inadequacy of older territorial com- prehensions of the world order.