Internet Bill of Rights

In principle data should belong to the originator of the data. If the data is meta data about a person or legal entity then it should be something like the creative commons BY-NC-SA so that the data would be in the public domain but commercial use could be compensated or prevented.

@andrewreitemeyer I agree with your comment, but data ownership is orthogonal to the subject at hand, which is data sovereignty, specifically, which state's laws apply to a kiwi's data hosted in a US datacentre. NZ law? US law (including DMCA and Patriot Act)? Both? Neither, As @andrewmcpherson argues? We need to establish two things things here; which is currently the case in practice, and which we think should be the case. In the two differ, then we need to draft policy advocating for change.

BTW BY-NC-SA is a copyright license. Public domain, by definition, means "no [copy]rights reserved", so commercial use is allowed. I think the phrase you're looking is something like "freely shareable".

We are discussing an internet bill of rights. Which covers ownership - Section 21 of our Bill of Rights
I think that by default the data should be under the jurisdiction of the content creator. In transit and in storage it should be under safe harbour provisions
or something similar to the high seas law.

IMMI is looking into the international aspect of data protection. https://en.immi.is/

Sorry @andrewreitemeyer, you're right that Internet Bill of Rights is the topic. Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

But again, ownership and sovereignty are related but separate issues. If I own a house in NZ, it's clear that I have ownership (of a freehold title) but the NZ State still has sovereignty over it. If I own a house boat (or data which is also mobile), I have ownership (as chattel property) but which state has jurisdiction over it? My understanding is that when at sea I'm under the jurisdiction of Maritime Law, and when in port (hosted on someone else's server) I'm under the jurisdiction of whichever state rules the territory the port (server) is in.

This may be reasonable (depending on how reasonable the government of that territory is) but it means I need to aware of what whose territory ports (servers) are located in, how reasonable their laws are, and whether or not to dock (host) my boat (data) there. The alternative, as @andrewmcpherson suggests, it to treat the net as its own jurisdiction, with is own governance (or lack thereof), but states appear not to accept this, and treating activity of the net as separate from the "real world" creates its own problems, and we've seen with the Harmful Digital Censorship Act.

I say it in the light of the old concept of the internet as an anarchy, just as the united nations is.
What we need in the light of the new idea that the internet is subject to the laws of the nations of the world, is lawmakers who actually understand science, maths, engineering and programming.
Which is where the pirate party comes in of course.

However, in the meantime it remains highly dangerous that most of the world's jurisdictions operate in ignorance of the workings of the internet, from US senators remarking that "the internet is a set of tubes", through to Russian MPs shutting down wikipedia for "promoting gay propaganda", or Pakistan banning and blocking Youtube across most of the world for several hours.