The Territory of Data or the Data of the Territorial State? The Shift of a Paradigm

This chapter explores the issue of spatiality with respect to data. It addresses the reasons why the state’s sovereignty needs to apply the principle of territoriality to appropriate fictitious or physical shares of power. By introducing the notion of territoriality and the implications of its applicability to data, the chapter attempts to answer this question: whether territory can be deployed as a formal container or instead it is an inherent legal mechanism to exert sovereignty over data flows. Moving on this ambivalence, the relation between territory and data has been set up differently depending on the prominence of each concept. In the first case, data relates to a corporeal concept being able to occupy a limited space, which is territorial; in the second case, the relevance of territory is more normative in the sense that it exerts traction over objects regardless of their materiality.