API Economist: When it comes to cloud computing, what’s the future of data sovereignty and the need for data to reside in-country?

Jonathan Murray: It all boils down to political economics. A very good friend of mine is Professor John Zysman at UC Berkeley. John's a political economist and he spends his life thinking about what's the intersection between government institutions, policy, regulation, and how economies develop. One of the things John told me very early on, when I first met him, was that you can look at the world in two ways: there's the potential of technology, where we can see this bright future and all the opportunity, and then there is the regulatory environment, social context, and the economic context that technology has to fit into. Ultimately, the pace at which technology is adopted and the degree to which technology is adopted is driven by both government regulation and cultural frameworks, and not by the desires and the interests of the technology industry.