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Just my impression: if this was Google, then yes. It is very hard to replace Google at this point in time.

Facebook is on its way out. Due to the network effect, Facebook will stay relevant for a long time. But if Facebook would leave the EU then it wouldn't take long for other social networks to take its place.

Facebook is relevant because everybody is on Facebook. Not because it is such a great service.

Personally, I am way more worried about Google.

That network effect can't be underestimated.

In the olden days of a new social network every other week the percentage of my friends and family on each social network (including Myspace, the most dominant) was relatively low, so the pain of switching was low.

Now the percentage on Facebook is extremely high and I don't even know what an alternative would be.

Lots of friends and family are on Whatsapp, quite a lot of people use Instagram but beyond that... there's very little uptake in any other heavily used social network. And of course, they're both owned by Facebook anyway.

So, for me at least, to say Facebook is on the way out, is something I cannot agree with.

Do the people you know actually engage with Facebook a lot, though?

I'm still on it and log in a few times a week but I engage far less. I recently used a Chrome extension to delete my old comments and I'm surprised at how much more I posted on it (and publicly, too). Although changing the newsfeed to be mostly memes and adverts was one cause of my disengagement, I think it's also just changing use. I haven't really noticed the recent changes Facebook touted because my friend network simply seems to engage with it less. Maybe a few people still insist on posting dozens of photographs of every trip they take, but I see so much less public discussion and so on.

What happens to a social network when the 'social' bit tails off?

anecdotal, but on my daily commute i see people "engaging" with facebook (and instagram) all the time.

Due to the network effect, you may end up with lots of people using Facebook, but actually disliking the service.

What you can see happening is that people treat Facebook more as a news feed then as a platform to communicate with friends.

Once personal communication moves away from Facebook, other communication is likely to move as well. It may take as while though. When that happens, Facebook will be more like a twitter feed.

I'm really curious what will happen to WhatsApp. Will it stay the way it currently is. Or will it become some sort of Facebook?

I wish people would stop taking their anecdata so seriously . . .

> What you can see happening is that people treat Facebook more as a news feed then as a platform to communicate with friends.

I see the opposite trend. People ignore worse-than-useless feed more and more, moving to messenger and especially group chats.

Until serious competitor appears (and I mean real one, not HN-ideal decentralized-blockchain-powered one), FB stays. Tons of people using it in spite of their dislike of the platform has not stopped FB's growth, and who knows if it brings any actual change any time soon.

Let's pretend facebook leaves and a EU competitor who follows the GDPR comes alive and Europeans start using it... And the other people outside the EU start using it to stay connected with their EU friends and family... and companies all around the world start using it to stay connected with their EU clientèle... and some major "celebs" start using it either as a political statement or because they don't like that facebook invades their privacy... and then other people outside the EU start using it to stay connected with the other outside-EU people, celebs and companies who already started using it...

We actually had a "facebook" in Germany once named StudiVZ. What killed it was low quality (i.e. many bugs), mismanagement, but more importantly facebook's network effect. If facebook leaves or gets pushed out of the EU, it's entirely possible it will suffer a lot or even go the MySpace route, being hit by hard by the network effect a new European player may create.

Unfortunately it is the nature of the internet social network sector to be monopolistic. Few (if any?) local social networks have survived because people typically - especially europeans - have friends outside EU. VK is a notable exception and i wonder how they made it - possibly anti-americanism played a role.

In a way, facebook should wish they have some competition, so they can avoid all the nosy anti-trust questions, but they don't.

vk is big in Russia (and some other parts) because they are proper Russian, in Russian and for Russians, and they are largely unmoderated, so you can easily find nice and nasty in the same place and also all the warez, porn (incl revenge and child) etc you will ever want. It's really the "wild east" there; I was pretty shocked when somebody started spamming child porn vk groups to one of the websites I moderate (and they were active weeks later still).

Then again, I was told by some Russian acquaintances that vk does not try to push American/European morals (like no nudity for America, no "hate speech"/gore for EU) and that really is how they explain it is so popular (then again, of course you wouldn't want to run an LGBT community on vk). Other folks from the West and Latin America found it useful too. E.g. I read that some German Nationalists/White Supremacist fringe groups moved to vk because it will not crack down on those groups, unlike Facebook.

But back to my point: if the EU really cracks down on facebook so that it is (forced to) stop(s) being available in the EU, then some new player from the EU might fill the gap and the network effect of friends and family may drive people to the EU version that anybody can use and away from the US version that EU cannot use and is a privacy nightmare anyway; so the effect may point in the opposite direction this time. I know the likelihood of this happening is pretty low, but a lot less low now with the GDPR and the EU politicians' new found interest in facebook's business model.

I'm sorry but what is your source of information exactly? "Hate speech" vkontakte is very dangerous in Russia and could put you in prison for a long time. Even upvotes and reposts could lead to very undesirable outcome. On the other hand I never heard of any problems for LGBT communities: despite western propaganda no one really cares about them. It didn't took me long to google them.

I don't remember any significant bugs in studivz. Also, in my opinion, the site's design was very clear and straightforward. I definitely preferred it over Facebook and would still.

How so?

Pretty much everything that Google offers has good alternatives, and there are little or no network effects except for YouTube.

E.g. you can use Bing Search, OpenStreetMap/Bing Maps, Office365, Fastmail, LineageOS, AWS/Azure, Vimeo instead of the Google products.

In fact, the search engine is the only product that might be significantly better than alternatives.

> Personally, I am way more worried about Google.

The reason I'm not is that Google appears to be a /lot/ more willing to respect their user's privacy, and were ahead of the curve with allowing opt-outs of personalized advertising and the likes...

Have a look at the data they have on you.

I was really annoyed to see all my duckduck go searches via chrome got stored (there was a reason I was using duck duck go). Plus they know my email. Even if I used a different email address probably 50% of my emails would still go via google because that's what my contacts have.

Facebook is less transparent, but they get a fairly crappy subset of my data in my opinion. Plus I barely use it this days.

I agree with that analysis. The main reason why Facebook is relevant in Europe is because everybody is still on it - but actual usage is steadily decreasing, especially in the younger generation. Most communications nowadays is done via WhatsApp, but that is trivial to replace. (Telegram is already quite popular, and then there is Signal, Threema, etc.)

Of course, it would be a blow for individuals if all their uploaded content was suddenly locked. But at least in Germany FB already has such a bad reputation that public indignation might center more on the company than on the EU regulators.

> least in Germany

Germany is draconian about privacy , but a lot of the rest of the EU is really not. I would even expect a backlash to GDPR from businesses or politicians or people who lose access to audiences.

GDPR is a whole other story. While I applaud the spirit, it is one nightmare of a regulation. (This is speaking from the small non-profit / volunteer organization sector - we neither have the know-how nor the manpower to deal with its requirements.)

Draconian? Just because we got laws in Germany saying you need permission to store personal data and you need to make available that data upon request and/or remove it upon request?

One thing I always found rather bizar is where ISPs break internet connections after 24 hours to force the customer to get a new IP address.

And then the next step was where the home routers would disconnect after less then 24 hours to make sure that the disruption happens in the middle of the night. Or something to that effect.

I wonder if in Germany people get new telephone numbers every 24 hours as well.

Ye, that's true... They started doing it so that you didn't just keep your IP for ages as a quasi static IP and then host things from there... because the "dedicated" lines with a static IP were/are different offers with a lot bigger price tag.

Yes, it's ridiculous, but has nothing to do with privacy laws.

I imagine US regulators would be on Facebook's side there. The US can't really tolerate a world where the EU purports to reach inside American borders and forcibly reorganize American companies.

Normally I’d agree with you, but my personal opinion is that this current administration seems to only help those it personally approves of (extending an olive branch to China and ZTE, coal miners, steel mills, middle America...) and root for the demise of those it doesn’t (Amazon/Bezos, any major newspaper, net neutrality, tech in general...)

The US regulators didn't seem to mind when the EU complained about IE...

When you do business in a country or union be prepared that they will enact their law on you.

Absolutely. Facebook deliberately chooses to have a business presence in the EU, and nobody denies that this means the EU can levy fines against them or set rules on how they operate within the EU.

The US have no qualms about regulating European companies, so they shouldn't complain. Just recently they were trying to keep Europeans out of Iran to enforce their unilateral sanctions...

Compliance would be facebooks best bet. If they pull out they lose a lot of money and give their competitors a large breeding ground to develop in. The superior privacy of competitor platforms would make them enticing for US users as well.

On the other hand, I guess Facebook really does not want to do that, because it would create an opening to attack Facebook. Right now, you can't compete with the network effects of Facebook's size, however if 10% or so of all Facebook users are up for grabs, and they are also correlated by region, then you could build a European Facebook competition and capture a strong enough base to effectively compete with Facebook. (Initially at least in Europe, however pretty quickly many people in the rest of the world would also have a 'European Facebook' account and then Facebook can't just rely on everybody is on Facebook anymore.)

I would actually be quite interested how that one plays out, I really don't have a good intuition of how that would look like.

There's currently a well-funded activist campaign advocating for breaking up Facebook by separating Instagram, WhatsApp, etc into separate companies: http://freedomfromfb.com/

What would a break-up of Facebook actually look like? With MS the threat to break up OS and apps led to browser choice as compliance; with hypothetical Google the business units can be dis-integrated. I'm having trouble thinking where the Facebook lines would be drawn.

> "As such, all of your data is unavailable for download and no longer subject to GDPR privacy regulations"

IANAL, but wouldn't this itself violate the GDPR?

Also not a lawyer (but skipping initialism of that), but I believe the GDPR covers any business servicing the region (EU), and this scenario indicates Facebook stop servicing EU.

However, they absolutely did business servicing the EU before and gathered an enormous amount of personal data of EU citizens by doing that.

As such I'd be surprised if they simply declare their service closed at one time and instantly lose all obligations for the data they collected in the past.

As an analogy, if you paid for some service in advance, the service took your money and then, instead of providing the service, spontaneously declared to end their relationship with you, you'd probably have good chances if you were to sue them.

Shut down the EU company entities, move all operations back to the US. There is no need to show a warning message to its users, EU laws do not apply to US firms. Also, despite what EU lawmakers may say, a purely US-based internet company is not required to comply in any way with EU laws even if they have customers/visitors/users in the EU.

If that’s the case, why do any multinational tech companies have entities outside of their home country? There has to be something that allows them to access banking and finance in each country, no?

Convenience, processing payments in local currencies, making use of tax loopholes.

If Facebook wants to have any customers (advertisers) in Europe (and they do), then they are subject to EU laws.

They do have to comply with EU laws if the EU says so. If nothing else, none of their management will be able to visit the EU anymore without risk of being prosecuted.

Around 25% of Facebook's worldwide revenue comes from EU.

Taking your ball and going home means leaving a lot of money on the table.

A purely US-based internet company is required to fully comply with EU laws if they want to see a single (euro)cent from customers in EU, otherwise all that money can and will be seized.

Facebook can trivially afford to end all business in the EU as needed. Very little of their business growth is in the EU, and that will go for future growth as well. Courtesy of the changes to US corporate tax law, Facebook also has no need to store large sums of foreign profit overseas eg in Ireland or similar (where the EU can reach it).

They're one of the most profitable large corporations in world history in terms of margins. Their net income margin last quarter was 41.6%. Facebook will generate at least $23b in profit this year (probably closer to $25b). Giving up $4 or $5 billion of that is not a dire problem.

It depends on what you mean by "can trivially afford".

If you take it as "will they survive if they do that", then yes, it's true for the reasons you describe.

If you take it as "will they consider that as a plausible option worth discussing" the answer is hell no, it would be laughed at in their board room and not even given a serious thought.

Giving up $4 or $5 billion (actually, FB European revenue was 10+ billion in 2017; giving up EU would lose all the revenue but not decrease the costs proportionally, but not that the number matters) of that is much more than a dire problem, it's a taboo situation - they'll survive if it magically happens, but nobody would even dare to be seen allowing it happen or not doing their utmost to prevent it. Even if there's absolutely no way around it, they'll go down screaming and do pretty much everything possible and impossible to avoid giving up that much money.