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Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

Some questions I need answered, that have yet to be answered in the article, or the comments here:

Does Discord have an officially established business presence in the EU? That is, do they have an office? Employees? Remote workers officially living in the EU? A business license of some sort?

One of the large questions here, entirely separate from the validity of the technical issues is of jurisdiction, and the answers are extremely unsatisfying.

Edit: Yes, I understand that the GDPR claims jurisdiction. But this isn't my question. My question is also not, "does Discord have customers in the EU", or even "...run servers located in the EU".

My question is only, "does Discord have an established business in the EU?" I was unable to find an answer with a short search, and I'm unsure where to look.

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Yes, they have registered a company in The Netherlands:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4410339409047-...

https://www.kvk.nl/orderstraat/product-kiezen/?kvknummer=822...

Excellent, thank you!

This entirely renders the question of jurisdiction moot.

It's frustrating that the response to this question has been so negative. It's like even asking this question is forbidden.

Why do you need the answer to this?

If your follow up question will be "how can the EU do anything against a company that operates outside of its jurisdiction?", then the answer will be "by making it difficult for people in the EU to do business with Discord".

The EU could restrict payments to Discord for example, cutting their revenue.

Let me answer your question with another question.

Why is it so forbidden to ask this question, and know this answer? It's just a basic fact.

My suspicion is that the GDPR apologists know that it's a weakness for their argument, and are afraid to debate on that.

As it so happens, funnily enough, Discord has a branch located in the EU. This could easily end the discussion of "does the EU have jurisdiction?" The answer is, yes! Discord is a company in the EU!

We shouldn't be afraid of basic facts. If our argument can't survive a simple fact, then our argument doesn't deserve to exist.

You don't have to have a presence established in the EU to be under EU jurisdiction. Any european user makes you responsible to ensure GDPR rules for that user.

So even if Discord had no presence in the entire EU, no office, no worker, no nothing, it doesn't absolve the company from staying within GDPR rules for their european users.

Only way to get out of that problem is to block any user with a european IP, although even then you could have users using a VPN, not sure how this would handle before the law.

> You don't have to have a presence established in the EU to be under EU jurisdiction. Any european user makes you responsible to ensure GDPR rules for that user.

That argument has always seemed recursive to me. The law that says "having an EU user means you are under EU jurisdiction" is an EU law, so for it to apply to you, you have to be under EU jurisdiction. What's the base case?

GDPR applies to any company that offers services to EU residents. It doesn’t matter if the company has any presence in the EU.

Now, that means EU may not necessarily be able to force the company operating in a different country to pay up but if a company has any significant EU customer base, I assume they will play ball.

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