Yes, Google’s Services in China are adapted to local laws. But China only applies those laws inside it’s territory. China is not demanding that Google block “Tank Man”-Videos outside of China. The US wants to apply the Stored Communications Act outside of it’s territory (In casu to Ireland).
Devil's-advocate point of view: if SCOTUS decides in Microsoft's favor, won't that give them carte blance to play "keep away" with any data sought by law enforcement? Any potentially-sensitive data would presumably be stored outside the US's borders in that case, in a country with laws sympathetic to the company's interests. I just don't see a good argument to be made for allowing a company chartered under US law to behave this way.
IMO, if Microsoft has the ability to access the data, then they have the responsibility to turn it over in response to a legitimate court order. The fact that they chose to store the data on a server in Ireland, a server in Washington, or a server in orbit around Mars seems immaterial. If it's under their control, it's under their control.
well currently than they need to search a country that would not coporate. Currently if some bad guy would store sensitive/illegal or whatever data in germany and the us would come and ask for it, the german law enforcement would check if the request (would meet all requirements in the german law for data search, etc) is valid and if it would, they would hand over the data. that's how it should happen and how it actually happens to some extent.
The fact that it's currently stored on a server that happens to be outside the US strikes me as one of those clever technicalities that impresses us nerds but doesn't impress judges.
These data access/privacy/disclosure issues could have and did exist in the days of paper records. The tech stuff is just a spurious justification for stepping around 200 years of treaties this country has signed, many of which cover jurisdictional issues wrt multi-national companies.
https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/feb/no-error-here-microso...