I sometimes wonder if social media companies think threats like this hold weight the way it would if a car factory threatened to leave. I just see “Europe” shrugging at this one.
That's not to say the EU wouldn't shrug at it anyway. EU institutions are notoriously slow to react to basically anything, which can be both good and bad.
That's probably the bigger difference - if a car factory threatened to leave, it might be able to convince a local authority to grant it planning permission or whatever small thing it was asking for. But expecting the EU to overhaul its flagship privacy regulation to keep your business is a very, very big ask.
(For the record, I don't actually think this is a threat - as others have pointed out, these filings are very conservative when it comes to disclosing potential risks.)
As much as I'd love to dream that my fellow Europeans could be weaned off the social media poison by a simple court ruling... realistically, they would move to some new EU-based Insta clone in under three months.
Sure, but if Meta is going to continue being a pratty American company with no respect for how things are done on your side of the pond, where not leaving people open to naked predation by bigcorps is a fundamental principle, I don't think most Europeans would miss it that terribly much. Homegrown alternatives would emerge and most people would just use those and get on with their day.
If that'd allow to emerge multiple regional networks that'd be interesting too. Maybe draugiem.lv would make a comeback!
Where? Eastern Europe? Because where I live it's entirely the opposite.
If they were threatening something, they would have made noise about it.