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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

That could change. At some point, the cost of complying with EU regulation might be greater than the cost of shutting down the EU subsidiaries, and Facebook could do that, host all content in the US, and be subject to US law only.

Would the EU block Facebook as a response? I doubt that will be a popular move.

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That's not how things work. Under german law, if you provide a service that is targeted at german customers you're bound by german (hence EU) rules for that transaction, no matter where your company is located [1]. Enforcement may still be a problem, but since Facebook obviously needs to display ads that are locally relevant they need to have business interactions with EU company and it would be possible to make that at least harder, if not impossible. The EU doesn't need to block Facebook to punish it. Facebook may withdraw from the EU market as a result, but that's voluntary from facebooks side.

[1] having a german localization is a strong indicator in that case.

Neither of these are going to happen. Closing the EU subsidiary would be a PR disaster, especially after the recent lawsuit (Max Schrems vs. Facebook).

While the EU obviously wouldn't block access to Facebook, I doubt that the cost of complying with regulation would be larger than shutting down their subsidiary. Think ad revenue, declining user base due to bad PR, and I don't think this move would go over well with their investors.

Won't happen, and law doesn't quite work that way. Here's a case where an EU-based court chased a US company in Europe and won:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!

#facexit

Hosting the content only in the US isn't a solution. When a corporation faces a state actor, there is rarely a way for the corporation to come out on top. Didn't Brazil recently require WhatsApp to cease service in the country for a short bit of time?

>Didn't Brazil recently require WhatsApp to cease service in the country for a short bit of time?

No, a judge had whatsapp blocked in Brazil and it resulted in a backlash from citizens.

And AFAIK another increase in Telegram users, so Whatsapp bled as well.

And then you have e.g. Uber using that backlash effect as the core part of their business strategy, turning people against their governments to ensure a market for themselves.

And then you have tobacco companies suing countries for anti-smoking laws, because fuck it, why not.

And then you have corporations playing states and countries off each other by getting them to compete over jobs with tax breaks.

So no, nation states do not really have the upper hand over corporations. It's the other way around these days.

> And then you have e.g. Uber using that backlash effect as the core part of their business strategy, turning people against their governments to ensure a market for themselves.

Which only works in certain parts of the world - it's not like Uber is legal in Germany or that they made a lot of friends in Sweden lately.

Sure, but certain == most of the West here, and each place where it works makes it only easier for them.

It's not like companies need to get from zero to world domination in a single step.

>turning people against their governments to ensure a market for themselves.

If the government is no longer representing the will of the people in a democracy, isn't change the point?

Not when you change the will of the people to go against their own interest so that you can make a profit.

So who should decide when the people are too dumb to know what are their own interests and their own will?

It's the job of the government - to protect the common interest of the society that gives it the power. "People [being] too dumb to know what are their own interests" is pretty much a definition of the term "coordination problems", and humans form governments precisely in order to solve those.

>It's the job of the government

In a democracy the government's job is to do what the people want. Claiming it's the job of the government to prevent people from making decisions is antithetical to that.

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