Meta might consider leaving Europe?
Meta submitted their yearly report to the SEC [0] which states:
> If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on SCCs or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe, which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
[0] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/14039b47-2e2f-4054-9dc5-71bcc7cf01ce.pdf
83 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadit's 18 years too late!!! XP
Sure, but if Meta is going to continue being a pratty American company with no respect for how things are done on your side of the pond, where not leaving people open to naked predation by bigcorps is a fundamental principle, I don't think most Europeans would miss it that terribly much. Homegrown alternatives would emerge and most people would just use those and get on with their day.
If that'd allow to emerge multiple regional networks that'd be interesting too. Maybe draugiem.lv would make a comeback!
Where? Eastern Europe? Because where I live it's entirely the opposite.
If they were threatening something, they would have made noise about it.
That's not to say the EU wouldn't shrug at it anyway. EU institutions are notoriously slow to react to basically anything, which can be both good and bad.
That's probably the bigger difference - if a car factory threatened to leave, it might be able to convince a local authority to grant it planning permission or whatever small thing it was asking for. But expecting the EU to overhaul its flagship privacy regulation to keep your business is a very, very big ask.
(For the record, I don't actually think this is a threat - as others have pointed out, these filings are very conservative when it comes to disclosing potential risks.)
As much as I'd love to dream that my fellow Europeans could be weaned off the social media poison by a simple court ruling... realistically, they would move to some new EU-based Insta clone in under three months.
At least for IPO'd companies, you can see if they put their money where their mouth is by looking at what insiders do with their own stock.
http://www.openinsider.com/
"In August 2020, we received a preliminary draft decision from the Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC) that preliminarily concluded that Meta Platforms Ireland's reliance on SCCs in respect of European user data does not achieve compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and preliminarily proposed that such transfers of user data from the European Union to the United States should therefore be suspended. We believe a final decision in this inquiry may issue as early as the first half of 2022. If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on SCCs or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe, which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations."
I can also imagine that the local datacenters are just the equivalent of 'last mile', serving only that which needs to be handled directly, and data is passed asynchronously to the US for larger scale processing and analysis. Makes more sense if they have better (or cheaper) datacenter personnel in the US, or if things like equipment, electricity are cheaper over there.
* $15.826 billion in US/Canada
* $8.357 billion in Europe
* $6.244 billion in Asia/Pacific
* $3.244 billion in Rest of the World
- 15,49 dollar per European user
- 48,03 dollar per US user
Where are the privacy regulations the strongest?
For example, iPhone market share was still at 26% in Europe. We have different consumer behavior than the US ... and that you can realize in these numbers.
I don't think that's an example at all, I would argue even it is non-sequitur. iPhone just never became "cool" in Europe the same way they did with US teenagers, because in Europe no phone is "cool". Someone buying a $799 Samsung obviously doesn't have less spare money than someone buying a $799 iPhone.
While many do not have the money, many also have no interest spending the money on it.
For example, while services in the US can reach the entire country using one language, EU is far more splintered (and not just with respect to language). That is to say, we have way more local services that only target the market within a country. For such services, it's hard to justify as much ad spend as you might if your potential market included hundreds of millions of people.
I imagine Europeans are also more reserved about buying from small vendors in another EU country than Americans would be about buying from another state. I think some EU countries even have a reputation (undeserved or not) for being "sketchy." I've seen lots of sellers who refuse to ship to Italy, for example. I've seen people wondering whether the cheap car part vendors in Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania are trustworthy..
https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A...
EDIT: My Neigbhours still use facebook.com for news and questions about the neighbourbood (Or so I'm led to believe from them, not sure what the actual percentage of the neighbours actually use it.)
Most companies will create European subsidiaries (Facebook, Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, ...) to take the money but fullfilling their obligations. They will not let the money go to someone else.
If you take a look at how Apple bended itself over in China, there is a lot of imagination on what companies are willing to do for the money.
Now there is an issue with the extraterritorial overreach of the US CLOUD Act, which means the surveillance dragnet is extended to any US company, even if the data is hosted on servers outside the US. A strict reading of GDPR and Schrems II would mean that it is actually unlawful for Facebook to offer services in the EU.
A business would be stupid to abandon hundreds of millions of people that want to use their products.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec_impl/2021/914/oj?uri=CELEX...
[1] > In order to provide appropriate safeguards, the standard contractual clauses should ensure that the personal data transferred on that basis is afforded a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the Union (10). With a view to ensuring transparency of processing, data subjects should be provided with a copy of the standard contractual clauses and be informed, in particular, of the categories of personal data processed, the right to obtain a copy of the standard contractual clauses, and any onward transfer. Onward transfers by the data importer to a third party in another third country should be allowed only if the third party accedes to the standard contractual clauses, if the continuity of protection is ensured otherwise, or in specific situations, such as on the basis of the explicit, informed consent of the data subject.
Charging for premium features or business usage could work, though.