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Let them block the European market for a few hours or days and nothing will happen, except that they lose advertisement revenue. Let them block for months, and European competitors will emerge.

But why on Earth would they do that? And why should they?

I think if you blocked Facebook, you'd have million people in Brussels tommorow making democracy very personal.

> Let them block for months, and European competitors will emerge.

I don't think so. You don't build a second Twitter, Youtube or Facebook in "a couple of months". Plus, all of them would need to deal with GDPR and the copyright directive. So, despite the technical effort, there is also a huge legal effort.

Those major companies have just won, because the directive codified their content filtering systems as mandatory. EU just effectively made competition significantly more expensive.

Why the heck would they block the market that just made them easy monopolists?

It won't happen, that market is too big. They'll just negotiate what they believe is a fair cut and move on with business.

Yeah. And imagine how European politicians would spin this as global corporations blackmailing democracy.