Not much they can do against tech behemoths based in the US though. They can stop them from gathering EU citizen data, or at least approve laws that try to stop them but who knows what is really happening behind the scenes.
If Facebook declines to pay these fines, then presumably their execs would be arrested if they ever travelled anywhere in the EU.
While FB can claim that it “is only subject to the legislation of [the US].”, that is obviously not the case, and once the EU regulators gain their teeth, I'm sure we'll see FB change their tune.
It's interesting how many people here believe that there is no other possibility other than "we get what we want to happen".
Your faith is, IMHO, misplaced. There are many cases in history where other companies decided it wasn't worth the cost of doing business in certain countries.
Or they just successfully coopted the governments!
No, that's absolutely not going to happen.
Additionally, they'd never risk withdrawing from a market and letting a local competitor develop, take hold, expand, and attack them on home turf. Look at social networks and search engines in China.
EDIT: I see you are fairly highly placed in Google. I'm quite surprised if you genuinely think what you wrote, given the raw numbers you must surely know, but given your legal training, I am not at all surprised that you would posture as if you were unaware of this.
Character assassination, awesome!
Please leave the company i work for this out of this, always. I never speak for my company on hacker news unless i say otherwise. I've been very clear and consistent about that. Thanks!
However, given the personal attack, i'm done. This kind of stupid bullshit is one reason i've stopped contributing as much lately.
It's nice for you to present your opinion as if it was the only true possibility and everyone else is an idiot. It's not, however, a great way to foster a discussion. Tacking on a personal attack makes it even more welcoming.
It quite literally was (ie it's literally dictionary definition character assassination), and if you don't understand that, i'm not sure what to tell you
"However, it's a very convenient cop-out for you to duck out of the discussion. "
So, just to get this straight, your way of having a "discussion" is:
1. slag on someone's character and background for no reason.
2. drag irrelevant stuff into the mix.
3. Cast aspersions on their motivations for refusing to participate as a result.
Yes, if that's how you have "discussions", please, feel free to keep me the hell out of them.
I've participated in plenty contentious discussions on HN with actually civil people.
Plenty of folks on HN know i'm happy to participate, even in contentious topics.
I can get that kind of 'discussion' on Reddit. (IE Where the response would be someone pointing out that claiming someone else is posturing is itself posturing, etc).
Meanwhile, i'll stick to HN discussions with people who assume good faith and actually want to talk about the topic. When that stops being a possibility, i'll delete my account and go do something else with the time.
Firstly, you have not responded at all to my comment on your comment. A sensible and worthwhile discussion may come out of addressing those observations.
Secondly, crimes are in the eye of the judge, but as the accused perpetrator holding my own council, referring to your role in Google and your legal training was a kind of awe. I am a game theorist (the bridge between my applied mathematics and macroeconomics careers) and so I am well aware of the importance of signalling and posturing. I fully expect that a lawyer, schooled and practiced in the manner of approaching a debate, is equally attuned to how what is said and what is not said. The game theorist in me saw something closely resembling strategic pre-positioning, and entirely without second aims, I called it out for what it looked like. That is not character assassination (in my eyes) but just a tiny bit of critical reading of your prose.
If you really want your employer to be left out of this, you can signal that to us all by removing any references to Google on your (already impressive) profile. Or perhaps leave the reference to Google but also ad something to the effect of “leave my employer out of this".
Anyway, returning to the main argument: I doubt any internet behemoth can afford to pull out of the EU and lose access to 740 million affluent consumers because they'd instantly lose revenue that would ruin their bottom line while also giving local European companies a neo terra nullis to develop their products experimenting on their captive audience until they are ready to take the fight back to the behemoths’ home turf.
The internet blue-chips hate being excluded from anywhere because whenever they are excluded from somewhere their revenue drops and some new competitor starts to simmer.
I have no side in this debate, and I’m sure you already realize this, but having the company you work for (especially when you are at a higher than IC level) is the surest way for people to not do that.
Haters are disproportionately represented in replies.
Facebook (the website) is not rocket science. As for Google, replacing it could take time, but in the long run it's good to destroy their monopoly in Europe.
Not for some of us just starting our companies. "Worst" case scenario is smaller players that would otherwise play globally will now not play in the EU market.
I was told the other day, "don't worry about it if you don't have sensitive data." That misunderstands risk management. I have plenty of customer potential on this side of the pond, why even risk it until I am large and have saturated my pool? I plan on handling my data completely within the spirit of that law, I just don't want to risk it. Seems on risk alone, others will have to make the same decision as me. We're not losing out really (we can only grow so fast) but those in the EU that might want access to the global market, big or small, might be.
I get that regulations make it more difficult for companies to enter a market, but if that means more protection for the user privacy (in this specific case), I cannot see how that could be a problem.
The fact that the EU might have more data protection than, say, the US, could also be an added value to a service. Case in point: protonmail. It's not EU-based, but they use Swiss privacy regulations as a selling point. Some people are willing to pay more for that.
> I cannot see how that could be a problem.
This is a cost/benefit calculation, but not an easy one. In general a given set of regulations will have both costs to the consumer such as reduced choice and increased prices (due to regulatory costs being passed through), and benefits such as better protection of personal information in this case.
Now, the fact that users in the EU seem to currently be supportive of these regulations suggests that they are willing to pay that cost to get that benefit. And that's their decision!
But consider the scenario where this trend carries on, and startups are increasingly not able to get a toehold due to incredibly high compliance costs. That could stifle the economic development in the EU, and lead to further concentration of power as only large companies can afford to pay the lawyer bills to meet the regulations.
Yup, that was the point.
> And that's their decision
Some at least. It's modern European federalism. The same people that the lawmakers believe aren't able to make their own decisions about which services are good or bad for them are, yet, able to determine that these regulations will be beneficial.
That's a valid argument in a perfectly transparent world with even negotiating power. But companies are opaque or change their handling of data (that one is the basis of this story!) and there's a race to the bottom where most options are severely lacking in privacy.
And these regulations are a very minor impingement on free contract-making. You can still give up privacy, you just can't give it up irrevocably.
> And these regulations are a very minor impingement on free contract-making
Agreed, but it's a question of cost vs benefit. They may not be a minor impingement on smaller companies and consumer choice and may make minimal impact anyways. I think we can all see that, if the law is evenly applied, smaller companies stand to lose most. Granted, the EU tends to subjectively choose when to bring the hammer down and it's mostly on larger companies. But it's still not worth the risk.
> All this data
What, from my two large customers? So EU says I violated article 5 and the personal data wasn't "processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject". Ug, such subjectivity. It is so sad to see so many people want solutions to these problems that they assume the GPDR is it. I can't do business there just praying I don't misstep and go bankrupt or subjecting myself to the whims of these loaded terms like "transparency" until I am large enough to absorb the blow.
I think it's fair. You shouldn't break the law. That regulation may be overkill in terms of punishment, but that doesn't mean that the regulation itself is wrong. Laws are imperfect. Regulations exist in every industry and there's a reason for that. Over regulating is a burden for a business, but under regulating is bad for customers (or the environment, or whatever).
Anyone who thinks RTBF wont create internet graveyard is delusional. GDPR needs to explicitly exempt legally-obtained/user-submitted public PII ASAP.
[1] https://transparencyreport.google.com/eu-privacy/overview
[2] Which is obviously very low number. Imagine GDPR for 7 billion people.
I'd be very surprised if the case described in the OP was the last straw for FB in the EU though. By "change their tune" I really just meant that they will have to take another position than "your laws don't apply to us even though we do business in the EU". Exiting the EU would also be a change of tune as well!
(I don't have any numbers here, and would be interested in your thoughts, but I'd be very surprised if regulatory compliance was eating as much as 10% of FB's profit in the EU. I'd guess it's more like 1%. But that's just shooting from the hip based on my experience in a more regulated space than FB's. I'd expect FB to remain in the EU until regulatory costs made it unprofitable; it would seem hard to justify any other approach to their shareholders.)
The reality is, no board will in any circumstance quit doing business in the largest economic area in the world by far [2], at least if they want to keep their job. Thinking otherwise is just naïve, I'm afraid.
In fact, my impression is that these policies encourage all involved actors into developing a better business model that can accommodate different sensibilities, and hopefully explore new revenue sources. I'm sure something good will come out out of this for FB and the rest of data moguls. The 'we sell your privacy for peanuts' is a rat race no matter how you look at it, and it is in fact slowly declining for everything but mobile according to some [3].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/business/google-ai-china....
[2] http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/eu-position-in-world-trade/
[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/online-ads-revenues-going-to-...
I don't really see how this is comparable. Google has had a subset of things available in China forever (translate, as a clear example), and interacts with China for certain things (AlphaGo). That doesn't change the fact that none of its "moneymaker" consumer products have operated there for years.
If they turn off access for the EU, then many people will try to produce a new social network that can play by EU rules. You already know the features that are needed, just look at what FB does now. Social networks are very suspectible to the network effect. This/these new companies will be able to operate in the USA and EU, whereas facebook chooses to avoid EU. So what happens when there is another social network that's about as big as Facebook? Is that a good move for FB?
Facebook Ireland Ltd is a company in Ireland (an EU member). Every FB user outside the US & Canada has a legal agreement with them. I don't know who you pay when an EU entity buys adverts on FB, but if it's to FB Ireland Ltd, then there's the money you take. FB also has offices all over the EU. That's the property you sieze and charge.
A tangential, but political relevant point: tech companies are in a particularly bad spot in the US because they are hated by both sides; republicans hate them because they are perceived as having liberal bias while democrats hate them because of tax avoidance, worsening inequality, job losses due to automation etc. So a political action against them would be easier to pull off compared to some other sectors like energy or finance.
Worked for universal healthcare, right?
Whether this is jealousy, or its because people in Tech understand better the power, control and knowledge these companies have than the regular joe is something that isn’t clear to me.