Meta suspends Netherlands data center due to political pushback
datacenterdynamics.com
datacenterdynamics.com
As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created over the past few years, purely for Facebook to... sell more ads. That's not palatable.
Why do people so strongly critique Facebook for selling ads but not businesses from buying them?
For instance [0]
> The story of Ramon van Meer. He runs a company that sells ramps that help wiener dogs get up and down off the couch. For years, his company reached its niche audience through targeted Facebook ads. Then Apple changed the privacy settings on the iPhone, and suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working.
Why don't small & medium business owners like Ramon get critiqued for feeding the beast?
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-ti...
> suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working
Maybe Ramon should go onto wiener dog forums, groups, subreddits, and advertise his product. List on Amazon, or partner with smaller, online pet businesses like Chewy. I guarantee these will have high conversion rates than vacuuming up search queries for “wiener dog,” cross referencing them with device identifiers, browser fingerprints, Facebook pixels, computer vision tagged photos, and IP addresses to build a psychological profile you sell to Ramon. It may be easier for Ramon to click “sell to people who have wiener dogs,” but why shouldn’t a business be in charge of their own marketing?
Your example falls flat immediately: the ad buyers are not children. They're adults and should be held to adult standards of awareness and responsibility.
It makes zero sense that you used children and micro transactions as the example for why blame should or should not be allocated to ad buyers.
I somewhat expect adults to understand gambling and in-game transactions and the fact that they are somewhat manipulative [0]. I hold no such expectations for children who generally accept whatever is presented to them. Blaming a child for buying a box of digital gems or what have you will do no good.
Similarly, I don’t think blaming Ramon the wiener dog ramp salesman for advertising on FB is really going to challenge FB’s market dominance and iron grip of advertising. I don’t expect Ramon to understand issues of data privacy, internet surveillance, advertising monopolies, and walled gardens, or - if he does know about them from passing - I don’t think pressuring him to follow his conscience and resist the market size of FB will do any good.
“Blaming” businesses who advertise on FB without providing some alternative in the market will not succeed. Rather than blame Ramon, we should restrict FB’s ability to surveil people whether through private (e.g. Apple) or public (e.g. regulation) means. This way, as FB’s effectiveness dwindles, the market will produce some solutions as alternatives for these businesses to go.
Instead, pressuring and blaming FB for their handlings of these issues will prove far more effective. We’ve already seen some limited success with this strategy, landing FB in Congress multiple times and getting the Netherlands to reconsider their huge data center, not to mention issues of GDPR, the “right to be forgotten,” etc.
I chose children because just as I don’t expect them to resist loot boxes, I don’t expect business owners to resist FB advertising. I listed alternatives that Ramon should do as a good businessman if FB is not an option, and options I believe will yield more direct results and a more loyal customer base. The world is not divided into clueless children and perfectly knowledgeable and ethical adults. But rather than blame the advertisers (Ramon), we should go after the ad market (FB).
[0]: That said, I still think we should blame the companies who use dark patterns and casino strategies to trigger people’s tendencies to gamble or “roll the dice” after a couple hours playing a game. You could say “players” instead of children, but this isn’t really analogous to small businesses because I still expect some adult players to know when they’re being played. I don’t expect any small business to reject FB advertising if it is presented as a way to reach a huge customer base.
So advertise, but just not on FB?
>It may be easier for Ramon to click “sell to people who have wiener dogs,” but why shouldn’t a business be in charge of their own marketing?
You answered your own question. Marketing is hard work, and FB makes it very easy to target a huge customer base. Conversion might be good on reddit, but you can do that in addition. Why is FB off limits?
That's a pretty bold claim though. There may be other options but that doesn't mean that they are enough to sustain his business. I think it's plausible that there's a vast swath of products that could not exist without Facebook. A lot of them are probably crap products that I wouldn't like but someone does.
But then again oh, I don't have any problem with targeted advertising for products. I have a bigger problem with targeted political advertising and radicalizing engagement content.
Almost nothing is essential.
I think what people have trouble with are the other things forced on them. They don't want to be spied on, and they don't want to have loud full page videos thrown in their face.
I think it's plainly obvious that spying makes targeted advertising better, but I don't think we have proof that it can't work at all without the private-sector equivalent of the Stasi surveillance state.
I find the argument that advertising was somehow okay before the internet a hard pill to swallow. My recollection is that ads were misleading back then and reserved for larger businesses. It pains me to think about going back to that era.
On the other hand, it’s nice to find small businesses to buy from on YouTube / Instagram / Reddit. It’s also nice that I do not have to pay for these services with money.
So it’s not perfect on the internet. But it does seem a hell of a lot better.
Simple: Facebook is particularly slimy in their approach to engagement and making ad impressions, and so supporting their business is morally fraught. I won't elaborate because it's been beat to death as a topic.
Yes exactly. Advertising in a relevant forum is both on topic there and not infringing anyone's privacy.
Doing anything well is hard work. Facebook is just the easy cop out method to cut corners.
That's a very different thing to just dumping ads on people because they looked at one video about a dog.
Of course such forums have become pretty extinct recently but for some interests they are still there.
Wow. Have you tried this? Reddit mods will ban you in 5 seconds if it smells addy. Forums wtf? that is a niche niche thing these days. Even if you have good standing with a Twitter - that is close to a full time job building followers. FB makes a ton of money - cause this stuff is locked down.
On Facebook, I recall seeing an ad for a sticker you can put on your phone which supposedly blocks radiation to protect your brain. That is, in my not so humble opinion, a scam product which preys on and perpetuates a false fear. The first time I saw this ad, I recall commenting that it was a scam and people shouldn't waste their money, and reporting the ad. I saw it again recently on my monthly-or-so visit to FB, and the commenting was turned off, which is how most ads are delivered.
On car forums I used to visit, it wasn't uncommon for people to push scammy products, but there were also respected members identifying them as BS.
I ask because of the few small businesses that I know personally that bought ads on Facebook never saw an attributable increase in sales.
Throwing money at internet marketing without a lot of thought is probably throwing it away for many businesses. Hiring a specialist to do your marketing is often not really any better because the industry is rife with shysters.
If you choose 1024 people to give stock tips to, telling half that a random stock will go up and the other half it will go down, then ignore the group you were wrong at and repeat the process, you’ll end up with someone convinced you’re a genius because you gave them 10 accurate stock tips in a row.
Hide this inside a black box labelled “innovative machine learning” and you might even unwittingly fool yourself so it’s not even a lie.
People created this “problem” and now they have to artificially provide additional paraphernalia for them to be able to ambulate properly.
That demand should not exist.
Welcome to capitalism and the free world. Sometimes we just need to be tolerant of others and let them get on with it.
Blue dye on wool doesn't harm anyone. Even the Soviet Union a totally non-capitalist country allowed colors, so I don't know what your point there is.
Maybe you should ask these dogs; would you prefer to have never experienced life at all?
(Basically, I wonder how miserable they are. They seem happy when I see them.)
I'm not proposing to cull the existing dogs, just not to further a breed and other breeds of dogs that suffer health problems due to our artificial breeding. There are lots of other dog breeds that do not suffer more health problems than average.
I can't wait to cancel them in the town-crier for using a Meta ad platform to find me.
The onus is not on the buyers of the access. If the steward is negligent and/or careless, there will never be any shortage of ad-space buyers who couldn't care less about the steward's reputation and/or the long-term consequences for the publication and/or audience. If FB is open to becoming a raging dumpster fire, it will happen overnight if that were profitable for someone who could afford it.
A useful metaphor might be a homeowner next door who lets all-night parties attended by random assholes who trash the street and have zero respect for the neighborhood. No sane person blames the partiers, the problem is clearly the enabling, negligent homeowner.
Cry me a river, Facebook/Meta.
But yea influencers and the lot I tend to advise to stop using but well they struggle with their habits.
I guess for the same reason people tend to criticise drug barons more than street dealers, and dealers more than addicts.
Though everyone plays their part in an ugly business, there are power relationships in operation. Facebook know what they are selling and are gatekeepers to a near monopoly product. Businesses are desperately in need and find few alternatives these days. Facebook are apex predators and simply carry more responsibility and so deserve more scrutiny for their role.
A Danish/British lawyer has filed for a collective legal action towards Meta [0][1] seeking USD 3.2 billions in damages to Facebook users. The optics is that Facebook, from a perspective of competition law, has acted unfairly.
[0]https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-antitrust-facebook-idCN... [1]https://www.facebookclaim.co.uk/talks/interview-with-dr-liza...
Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ?
A quick search suggests FB consume on average about 1 gigawatt globally. The original article calls it a 200 megawatt DC. That would be 20% of facebooks global energy consumption.
Given FB seem to have 18 existing Data center locations it would imply huge growth or consildation plans for that DC to consume 200 megawatts all the time.
In 2020 the global renewable energy supply capacity was approximately 2500 gigawatts so facebook used less than 0.5% of that capacity.
There are lots of valid reasons to oppose facebook, but it doesnt seem that monopolising the consumption of renewabel energy is a credible one.
https://sustainability.fb.com/report/2020-sustainability-rep...
https://www.irena.org/publications/2020/Mar/Renewable-Capaci...
This data centre alone was going to use 10% of all wind power capacity in the NL [1].
It is not only about this data centre either, this was merely the largest and most egregious. There have been a number of new data centre construction plans in the Netherlands by other tech giants, all planning to use government subsidised wind parks. All so that these companies can pretend to be green and put up nice websites like the one you linked, while the actual wind parks and green energy generation is paid for by the taxpayers.
> Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ?
This was supposed to a colossal data center, the largest data centre in Europe [2]. They bought 166 hectares of ground (23M square feet) for its construction. It consuming as much as three of their other data centres would not be terribly surprising.
[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2409557-megadatacenter-facebook-zet-e...
[2] https://siliconcanals.com/news/europe-largest-data-centre-ne...
It doesn’t help that it’s Facebook, which implies it’s unlikely to have much impact in terms of enabling an ecosystem of third party users (which is unlike, say, Microsoft or Google datacenters).
This may point to a culture clash, a misreading of Dutch values. Dutch business is widely known for its matter-of-factness not to say bluntness, Dutch politics is known for "polderen", the grinding process of seeking compromises between all parties involved. It seems like Meta may have confused the two.
-------
> You would have thought Meta would have had employed plenty of Dutch resources with local knowledge.
Without doubt, the necessary US-based director-level people at Meta almost certainly did do that, as well as pulling-in expertise from the world of geopolitical consulting. And then immediately after reviewing all that input they didn't want to hear, the Meta folks very likely thought-up a quick plan that they knew for certain would outsmart those silly over-regulating and anti-business, Europeans... which clearly didn't, and hence we find ourselves in the situation we have today.
Do not underestimate the ego and (not mincing my words) arrogance of people who make it to the top: as soon as you start using "I'm C-level/D-level at Meta, I'm hot shit" in your thought-processes you're in for a nasty grounding incident, much to our amusement.
-----
Post-disclaimer: It's not about being American, it's about not letting your personal career success go to your head.
The reason we don't see non-American companies acting like this is because eventually all companies grow big enough to re-identify (if not relocate...) as an American company (...or they get acquired by an American company), because that's the single biggest market in the world, and you can't conquer the world without owning the North American market in whatever business you do, imo.
Maybe the problem is that Dutch "resources" are easily Americanized. The American and Dutch ways of doing business are not that different in style, just in scale. I suspect many Dutch entrepreneurs secretly think that if they just act a little more American, they can cut through the red tape and get things done. That may work on some levels, but not in Dutch politics.
The Netherlands is already the home of some FANGs (AWS has a few edge locations in Amsterdam) and dominant hosting providers such as Cloudflare.
I'm sure they'll be able to overcome the loss of Facebook.
According to today’s NRC coverstory it was the opposite: the project failed because of the aggressive lobbying demanding an exception. And Meta refusing to discuss their datacentre design. IOW it failed because of the way that Facebook treated politics. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/03/30/agressieve-lobby-voor-d...
If you read about the topic you'll soon discover that Meta/Facebook has been systematically imposing demands for preferential treatment, including demanding circumventing laws to allow agricultural land, some of which they don't even own, to instead be used to build high-density industrial buildings.
This, in a country where Amazon and Microsoft already operate their own data centers. In fact, Facebook rejected the location already used by Amazon and Microsoft, and instead decided to force their way somewhere else.
It's also worth mentioning some of the apparent corruption aspects of Facebook's deal, abusing preferential rights of the municipality to exclude competing bids.
We live in an age of energy scarcity. So even if people think about the electricity it uses, people probably see a data center as slurping up energy, causing prices for regular people to rise.
Even if it was about the cost of sourcing and provision, someone that big will bargain down close to the minimum. There will be little benefit to share around elsewhere, unless of course this is made specifically part of the bargain (they can build, in exchange _they_ improve local infrastructure to cope, as greenly as the locals desire, with stated benefits for the area with compensation clauses for if said benefits don't turn up).
Genuinely wondering because I keep not understanding this situation and I'm Dutch. Indeed, if people worry about that it'll use up all the green energy then let facebook pay for replacement renewable infrastructure that supplies MW equal to what they use, to be placed and functional anywhere in NL within X (1?) year(s) after the datacenter is turned on (we're not that big, we can swallow those transmission losses).
It’s not as straight forward as just paying more unfortunately as the rules are so much in favour of big consumers one first needs to change those rules before you have the ground to ask them to pay more.
Here is the source at the bottom table:
https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/...
See also an article that explains in more detail that it actually required a lot of lobbying to get Facebook interested: https://tweakers.net/reviews/9690/facebook-in-de-polder-meta...
And we're having to transition to green energy, and having great difficulty doing so, as you know. So a new thing that adds 10% extra national electricity usage isn't exactly welcome right now, imo.
I read elsewhere that we're talking about 160MW, that's 1.4 GWh -- if it would run at peak power all year long.
The netherlands uses about a thousand TWh of energy in a year. (Electricity or other energy doesn't really matter because it's all going to have to come from renewables in the end anyhow.)
That's not 10%, not 1%, not 0.1%, not 0.01%, not 0.001% but 0.0001%.
Don't want to defend facebook but let's keep at least keep the order of magnitude correct
The EU is in the middle of an energy crisis right now, so that might make that harder to sell.
The only reason it was allowed before is that politician get a hard on from dealing with big tech. Aka corruption
How did they convince existing locations if there is no upside for the community.
To me, if that concern is addressed, I would be ok with it (a more suitable location would be nice though), and planting a few extra trees is not going to cut it.
Windpark Noordoostpolder: 430MW
Your theory is good as a theory but in practice not. The entire power grid is currently not setup to hold a location so perfect for Facebook. If they cared about the environment and the power grid they’d put it somewhere else. As it’s currently it’s the pupation that would be paying for this addition for the grid and there are plentiful other interesting economic things to do with that kind of power use.
Honestly the fact that it’s Facebook does matter but way less than you think.
Consider that the EIA says NL consumed 3.818 quad BTU in 2019 ... this is about 1.1e12 kW-h, or 800x what a 160MW data center would consume. This size of data center, though fairly large, would still be much less than 1% of the energy story of that country.
Generally, data centers use far less energy that people suppose, compared to transport and industry.
So I would be surprised if that DC doesn’t require more energy than Amsterdam (at least the population, not sure how much heavy industry is there, but probably not too much)
""400 MW is equivalent to the electricity consumption of 200,000 households""
https://www.amsterdam.nl/en/policy/sustainability/renewable-...
So either they are taking all electric energy consumption and not the consumption of the household as their basis or (and more likely) they are talking about installed peak capacity necessary to provide the required electric energy over the year. But we would have to look where their marketing got their data from.
[1] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/netherlands/energy-consump...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder for the size of the wind farm.
The facility, which will use 1.38GWh of electricity and cover 166 hectares (410 acres) of farmland, is expected to run on green energy and provide the local economy a boost but has been criticised by some politicians and environmental campaigners.
1.38gwh is almost trice the optimal output of Flevoland and is indeed more in line with the total power consumption of Amsterdam. And will instead reflect several percentages of the national use.
Why not? If a company can credibly plant enough trees to offset, say, a century of their facilities carbon impact - that seems pretty good to me.
Do you have a source that that is the requirement? It's not my understanding.
You cannot "offset carbon" by just planting trees.
You also need to wait until they grow, chop them down, and not burn them but burry them underground instead.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/carbon-benefits-wood-bas....
(1) building burns (2) building is torn down and wood rots (3) building eventually collapses and wood rots
i.e. if you don't bury it, it eventually returns into the carbon cycle
However, it will only become abundant and cheap if those sales are permitted and investors expect that such opportunities will continue in the future, providing them a positive ROI on building 10Y or 100Y of generation capacity. If they expect their energy sales to be capped at X+Y due to hostility from the ignorant public, they will not build.
Let's opt for a solarpunk future where we pass Kardashev Type I and rapidly accelerate toward Kardashev Type II, not a post-apocalyptic dystopia.
Sounds like a good idea, but why start here specifically? There does not seem to be a general ban on expanding other things, e.g. installing a new AC when you don't even have solar panels yet is not discouraged let alone prohibited. Now facebook wants to build something and we trip over each other to complain about it. I mean, yeah, it's facebook, nobody cares if they have to find a suboptimal location and we're a good country to find dwarsliggers in general, but are we doing it for the climate or are we doing it because we don't like facebook?
FB was proposing a huge DC, and got attention for it. There is now a blanket moratorium and the country is investigating the effects.
Sure, the fact that it's FB probably increased scrutiny. But there's now some blanket ideas here. And honestly, FB could have tried more if they wanted to ("We will finance building out of green energy capacity to triple of our consumption" could have been a real smart move). Yeah, we don't ask other people to do it, but other people don't have billions of dollars at their disposal to make large scale changes! And it's 200MW! A big number, and a huge project. Yeah, you'll get more scrutiny.
(And yeah, making some law that new housing has to have solar panels in general would not be a bad idea!)
EDIT: https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2020/12/04/200-mw-sola... this 200MW australian solar farm looks to cost $300M. Now it's not apples-to-apples cuz of loads of reasons (in particular large swaths of land would be needed). But let's imagine being able to build 400MW out for 1 billion euros. That is a decision that somebody at FB could make.
This large American company is simply giving the Dutch something on which to focus their own abundant hypocrisy.
(FTR I'm Dutch so I see this constantly in news, I'm part of this wasted-time group...)
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/total-energy/to...
https://tech.fb.com/engineering/2021/04/renewable-energy/ Facebook's renewable energy projects are pretty impressive and if other energy usage estimates in this thread are to be believed they've added more than they consume.
Conflicts with
> After the local council approved the project, party Leefbaar (Liveable) Zeewolde ran on a platform of opposition to the data center, citing environmental concerns and a lack of local input.
But then Facebook's response seems pretty reasonable to me:
> “We strongly believe in being good neighbors, so from day one of this journey we stressed a good fit between our project and the community is foremost among the criteria we consider when initiating and continuing our development processes,” Meta said in a statement.
To me all parties involved seemed pretty reasonable, the previous administration was favourable to the project, but got subsequently voted out of office. Now they just want time to make sure that they didn't get voted out because of that project. Facebook seems to understand.
This data center is ridiculous beyond belief in Dutch aspects and that is even got this far in voting is solely due to the prime ministers choice to push these responsibilities toward local municipalities, a village of 30k inhabitants deciding if a power consumer equivalent of 700k inhabitants would fit in their region. The way they Facebook made their case was a joke too as they, just like Google and Microsoft argued there’d be many job opportunities and rest warmth.In addition they argued they needed to have an exception to be added to the power net which is already massively overburdened and lagging, just for the sake that the reigning party can appease their consumer. Even Eric Wiebes, the then minister of economics, meddled in this business in favour of “getting it done”. In the end our prime minister Mark Rutte who was from the same party also started to chime in to move things forward.
That this was shot down was only because, indeed, the entirety of the Netherlands was against this data center and the local municipality elections came by and destroyed all the parties that voted in favour. All of a sudden the powerless Huge de Groot found a way to block this thing.
It is more than a political decision but that this got blocked in the end does move me slightly away from the extreme cynism that is most apt as view on the whole of the Netherlands policital theater.
I don't see why that's a problem?
> added to the power net which is already massively overburdened and lagging
Is that being worked on? Is there a reason the electrical payments from the datacenter couldn't be used to make the power network net better? Charge them a higher rate for the first x years if necessary.
Or pay for non-Russian gas?
The energy network has some issues. It needs a lot of work to be upgraded. Salary of technical engineers in semi-government is maxed and there is a shortage or workers at the infrastructure companies. Then there is a first come first serve rule for new connections which causes sun farms to go where the land is cheap, which is often the opposite area from where energy is used.
The idea that you mention on charging them more and higher would indeeed be interesting be it not that the highest politicians aided in lobbying for a preference treatment that would save them quite a bit. The way it’s setup is that the population would eventually be paying for this addition for the net as big power consumers are extremely heavy subsidised up to the point that the heaviest users don’t pay any power taxes after a certain point.
If the prime minister is deliberately pushing it to the local level, I still don't see what the issue is.
Also is the local municipality in charge of getting them electricity? If they're only in charge of allowing the construction then that's fine.
> The idea that you mention on charging them more and higher would indeeed be interesting be it not that the highest politicians aided in lobbying for a preference treatment that would save them quite a bit. The way it’s setup is that the population would eventually be paying for this addition for the net as big power consumers are extremely heavy subsidised up to the point that the heaviest users don’t pay any power taxes after a certain point.
So the actual problem is the high level government?
Yes indeed in this situation the actual problem is the high level government causing this oddity. From now on, and also how it used to be before most responsibilities were delegated to the locals, the government itself will be in charge of these decisions.
Yes. If all the sorely needed renewable energy were to be used for something useful,there wouldn’t be this much opposition. Using it for doom scrolling, ads, and waste of time - sure sane people are against it. I’m happy that people see through the bullshit for once.
IMO, They should be allowed in only if they produce 100% of the renewable energy they could consume. Let Facebook pay the millions in windmills and solar panels, and sure, they can be part of the society.
I'm assuming your comment is in good faith, and you're not from Facebook's PR team. I don't think you're aware of the history of the case. Local opposition to the project is nothing new - starting with how Facebook hiding its identity with the locals.
The full list of reasons is much more than I can comfortably type, I'd recommend reading this wired article instead - https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-dutch-data-center/
Compare the DC to a landfill. Do you want one in "your garden"? Probably not, but it's not like you are going to convert to zero waste and render the project irrelevant.
Hey hey, don't give them ideas. We don't want them here.
Plus, given current European energy struggles, when Germany considers rationing power delivery, deploying Facebook space heaters sucking 200MW is not only irresponsible, but should be criminal.
While I see your point in general, also because servers are not typically put in oil or anything so this would be hot air (much less dense than water), I wonder if it's as simple as that. It's not like the Netherlands has spots where you are further than a handful of kilometers from the nearest buildings and, often, towns.
On top of that, the farmland isn't necessarily even growing food. They may be growing, say, tulips.
Strictly speaking, Dutch can be taken to refer only to the people and language, with Netherlands referring to the country. Hence 'Royal Netherlands Air Force' (Koninklijke Luchtmacht) and 'Netherlands embassy in London' (Nederlandse ambassade in Londen).
In popular speech, however, Dutch is also frequently used to refer to the country, i.e. 'Dutch embassy in London'.
In the Dutch language, the two words are the same: Nederlands (referring to the people, language and country).