Hacker News Reader

With over 500 million people in the EU that's a lot of potential market going to waste by not being GDPR compliant.

Unless, of course, their central business model is incompatible with GDPR-compliance in the first place...

In which case there can be no EU competitor.

You can have a competitor providing the same service using a different business model.

But the 'competitor' will have much lower revenue than Facebook because of the lack of targeted advertising.

And much less users too...because of less relevant ads and content in general!

Its a guess. Facebook also controls many of the "competitors" currently. Its also not about not being compliant, they want their customers, its just not worth reevaluating core aspects of the business when they believe people will sign whatever they have to to continue using Facebook.

They also have to consider the risk that complying too much will inspire copycat regulations