Everyone seems to assume that it won't happen.. that public companies can't ignore the EU market without shareholder revolt, but if the EU's vision of tech is more restrictive than the rest of the world's, it might just be the way that things go.
you got to be kidding me, Apple is still doing business in China. The only reason a company ever opts out of the market is public perception or governmental pressure, companies don't care as long as they make a single cent. American tech companies operate in almost all countries in the world. Have you seen how the web is regulated in most of the world where American tech companies do business
Threads not yet launching in Europe says more about Facebook's expectation of Thread's profitability than anything else. They know themselves that nobody will be using that app in a year
That's an interesting perspective, given that the legislation is aimed at opening up the big players' platforms/products to more competition by forcing them to eliminate restrictions.
Any freedom can be viewed in one of two ways:
- A set of boundaries that sovereign states are required to respect (Congress shall make no law), or...
- A set of competing interests that have to be balanced in order to maximize the desired freedom for the maximum number of people (your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins).
The US codified the former in its constitution, because the formation of the current US government was a struggle between the people who found the prior Articles of Confederation to be unworkable[0] and the people who didn't want to build British Empire 2: Electric Boogaloo. The compromise was that we'd codify very obvious things the government was not allowed to do based on what horribly unpopular things the British did to the colonies. This is why we have a strong constitutional prohibition against being forced to quarter soldiers in one's home, even though you rarely see it get used in court. This as applied to freedom of speech is the 1st Amendment, which covers basically every way that the right of freedom of speech had been curtailed in Britain up to that point[1].
However, because we have this very strong prohibition on the government restricting speech, people have misinterpreted it to mean that only the government can restrict speech. That is, if Comcast refuses to let you watch Netflix unless they get paid more for the traffic, that's Comcast's protected speech, and any government regulation to unblock Netflix is censorship. Or, alternatively, if someone decides to publish your personal information in response to a video you don't like, the resulting mob justice against you isn't censorship because it's not the right person holding the gun, and taking down your personal information would be censoring the person who published it.
This is, of course, absurd. But the US has exported and normalized this thinking beyond the narrow realm of constitutional law scholars. Right-wingers were able to successfully appropriate 'free speech' to mean 'turn every website into 4chan', and in response, liberals made the mistake of adopting the Comcast Argument I listed above. This is how we got arguments like "Twitter and Facebook can't censor because it's a private platform", even though it's a monopoly. Now that Musk owns Twitter and boosts the far-right in exchange for them protecting Musk's fragile ego, I fully expect this calculus to flip and you'll see right-wingers go back to the Comcast Argument while liberals call for regulation.
The EU's tech regulations would be condemned by the same logic. i.e. the EU should not be allowed to regulate big tech, because only sovereigns can censor, and censorship is so bad that we should not even censor the people engaged in censorship[2]. The boundaries argument ends up with a nominal right to free speech that is defacto privatized censorship, which is a problem the balancing argument does not have.
[0] for reasons largely similar to the problems the EU faces being an international union rather than a federal state
[1] I would also argue that it is a de-facto ban on "culture war issues", given that religion and wars over minor church schisms were the European culture war of the 1700s.
[2] https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/goebbels-on-the-reichst...
That would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. It limits the scope of these behemot monopolies. The immediate consequence would be different companies serving different markets instead of global monopolies.
Depending on your age you (the general you) might think how can people communicate then? If my family in europe can't be on facebook but I'm on facebook in the US? (Or substitue facebook for any walled-garden proprietary ecosystem).
The answer was the reality back in the 90s. The world was full of thousands of hyper-local ISPs. Everyone communicated via standardized decentralized protocols such as email and usenet. Nobody owns it, everyone can participate. This was the best of all possible worlds.
If cutting off the walled-garden monopolies from some countries or regions can move us back to that decentralized ideal, it would be a wonderful thing.
Good for us, EU citizens. You might believe everything coming from the US is a godsend. It’s not, I’d rather have your privacy invading, gate keeping monopolies be forbidden here, as much as possible. Makes more room for the EU tech scene.
Plenty of US and western companies operate to make a buck in far more restrictive markets around the world.
I watched Apple grow into a 1T dollar company doing the opposite of everything you said, while marketing everything you mentioned.
So... it might work.
That "certain point" is so far away, it might as well not exist.
Google and Meta were at their product peaks somewhere much closer to their "2 guys in a garage with 128MB of ram" stage than their current "enormous adtech behemoth" stage. And it's my impression that much of what happens in innovation at both companies is primarily just fiddling with knobs on the adtech products to see if you can get 0.001% more money out of it, with some predatory copying of up-and-coming potential competitors apps to try to kill them and then a tiny bit of halfhearted actual innovation (quickly abandoned when it doesn't become the next ads in terms of revenue).
Look at all the products Google has launched, and then killed because it didn't compete with ads so they didn't care? Literally dozens of medium-sized businesses worth, and they leave behind a scarred market because incumbents likely got smashed when Google released their product.
I'm just saying - I think you would be surprised at how fast a google-shaped or meta-shaped hole would be filled. Especially since Google search is an entire screenful of ads before actual search results at this point.
Gmail competes primarily on having highly deliverable email due to its massive adoption. This is part of the problem of email in general, and not necessarily a good thing about gmail.
iOS - see android. Heck even Ubuntu has a phone OS, or did? There would be competitors here.
WhatsApp has a million competitors.
We're not talking about amazon or windows afaik? But Amazon is mainly competitive because it is a giant logistics network which isn't tech related and afaik not really something the EU generally takes issue with.
Windows is already dying (it has ads in its start menu!!) and has had competitors for ages, both Linux and Mac.
TikTok is notable primarily because it's good at addicting users which I think is something the EU would again be fine to lose.
On the other hand neither TikTok or Instagram are actually a product which a society will miss its functionality, a lot would argue that we would actually be better off if they didn't exist at all.
add to that, us tech giant were made in a time where opensource & privacy concerns weren't knew as much as now