Meta threatens to pull Facebook and Instagram from Europe if it can't target ads | Hacker News Reader

Meta threatens to pull Facebook and Instagram from Europe if it can't target ads

itwire.com

65 pointsmarban26 comments

That's funny, both because they won't actually ever do this, and because even in the alternate universe where they do, nobody cares. FB/Meta is living on borrowed time and lack the depth of wealth Microsoft had when they were in this situation.

What makes this situation unique is Facebook is no longer able to innovate, both on its own or through acquiring innovators due to antitrust concerns. What comes next is an increase in rent seeking behavior, while fleecing the existing users and identifying whales.

Don’t threaten us with a good time. Please leave.

I can live without both. I unfollowed everyone and everything on FB and log in maybe once a week on my PC to check for event invites. (Covid has diminished those too)

On Instagram I only followed some old acquitances. Not really anything I could not live without. Stopped using it altogether.

Now, I don't know if most people can live without them but I certainly can. Deleted both apps and never looked back.

Weird seeing Meta threaten like this when their time on the limelight has come and gone. Tiktok is eating up Meta's users it seems and it shows.

I wouldn't mind if the EU took a critical look at Tiktok's data use as well.

Didn't Meta just claim that they were all in favour of government regulations? Now they're whining and crying they have to follow the law. Good riddance to bad rubbish if they go through with it. Now if only we could get them to leave Canada.

They probably assumed that they would be the ones writing those regulations, and I think that's a fair assumption for the US market. Monopolies are big fans of regulatory capture, and politicians benefit greatly from them. The EU seems (to me, an outsider) to be more resistant to that sort of influence; at least from corps based in the US.

It helps that EU is still not a single country, so monopolies influence work differently across a collection of countries.

No. They work the same. They just need more people.

Didn't they just report the first the first time ever user decline? Not exactly a strong negotiating position.

Yes, they're fairly deleveraged here, and I'm surprised they did not coordinate responses better from a PR standpoint.

Just amateur-hour clumsy.

Great news, good riddance! I'll miss the amusing fact checking though.

Yes please!

Haha, next step is to publish this as front page news in newspaper tomorrow. Haha

After this spread message how Facebook supports small creators and business in EU.

We know all your tricks, Zuck sir.

EU is scared ...

Given this last quarter earnings tanked partially because they were no longer gaining new users, maybe that kind of posturing is going to fall flat.

And good riddance.

If by "threatens" you mean "mentions an unlikely possibility in their form 10-k to cover their asses"

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30207734

That's incorrect. They could well target ads by systems deployed in Europe.

They just can't pass data to the USA.

It shouldn't take long for some enterprising Europeans to create a far better, less polarising social networking site. It could even be more culturally sensitive and inclusive.

It shouldn't, and yet, why isn't there already one?

There are plenty of innovative tech companies coming from Europe, but most of them get gobbled up by American ones, or never break through internationally.

Interestingly, Netherland was one of the last countries where Facebook finally became the #1 social network; for a long time, a Dutch social network called Hives managed to hold out (over 10 year ago, mind you). And even now, Amazon isn't even in the top-3 of Dutch internet retailers. But I don't see bol.com or Cool Blue expanding internationally.

It should absolutely be possible for European tech companies to compete with American ones, and yet it's not really happening. Where is the big European cloud provider designed around the EU's data protection rules? Why are big European internet retailers all national affairs and not at least EU-wide?

What is an alternative that is not the same rotten and makes money to comply with the massive stack of rules you have to comply with now? Or has a way that is not needed (p2p content only).

I guess the alternative is some other social media network (possibly European?), which will be more likely to be regulated from an earlier stage in it's lifecycle and therefore to be better behaved in terms of user privacy.

This is probably not going to happen anyway: I am more curious if we even have a viable alternative. If the network has user content, it will need a lot of money to hire people to moderate it. How can that be paid for without violating privacy (ads/selling data)? Or, alternatively, you make sure you store no user data. Or something else that I didn't think of which is why I was asking.

Block cha cha chá chain.

Maybe, but it would be better if the personal info is not stored outside the computers of the people who agreed to share it amongst eachother than, as far as I understand with blockchain, having it stored everywhere (decentralized) and immutable (forever); while that has it's place to prevent censorship, it is seems not to fit social networks.

Related discussion over at [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30234026

Please help me understand the use of the word ‘threaten’ here? I believe very few would care (for a very short time) if meta actually did that

Reply on news.ycombinator.com