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Comment by DavideNL | Hacker News Reader

The hearing was a big joke. Zuckerberg simply avoided answering difficult questions by talking about something else entirely...

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What did I deduce from today’s hearing: 1. The weird question/answer format was probably a negotiated condition of Zuckerberg appearing. 2. This underlines the power of Zuckerberg: setting conditions for the EU Parliament is quite a show of force. 3. This condition was probably set because Zuckerberg is a very poor spokesperson. The end of the session was quite frankly bizarre when Zuckerberg refused to take questions. 4. There is quite clearly a mood for heavy regulation and anti-trust action to break-up the monopoly. Zuckerberg’s odd behavior will result in the sharpening of EU swords, not their scabbarding. 5. I have no idea what this type of activity will mean for EU/US relations. The US will be keen to protect homegrown global monopolies. The EU must break them before they break Europe. 5.

How can the EU break up foreign monopolies?

That’s a really good question. I guess one of the options would be to require social media companies to obtain a licence, subject to their non-monopolistic activities.

My guess is that there will be a FB sell-off today. Other countries will see the opportunity to raise a high tax rate on a natural monopoly, and FB returns will be tax-adjusted.

There are no sovereign companies. For instance, the NY financial regulations matter so much across the world because a large portion of the financial world’s business is headquartered there. But more so, governments set legal standards. If those standards are not met then products/services are outlawed. I’m pretty sure the EU could simply ban browsing to IPs associated with FB, as an example. I think the largest companies of the world want to believe they operate in some atmosphere above any individual government. But that’s not the case. They operate under the jurisdiction of at least all of the worlds largest governments, contemporaneously.

yeah but that's not a break-up

So they declare ownership over all FB assets in their nation and the data of their citizens.

Really though, I think maybe the act of combining data to form contiguous blocks of PII tied to online personas may need to be made illegal outside of some official, state database. Ie the government gives you a citizen entry and only they may produce such information. So you simply may not have access to certain PII.

> Ie the government gives you a citizen entry and only they may produce such information

thats a tad dystopian don't you think?

Governments are accountable to their people. Companies are accountable to their shareholders.

some are

No, dystopian is the current situation.

Isn't FB still an Irish corporation? As in, an EU company?

yeah but FB can shut that one down if needed and serve europe from the US.

They can't. They can attempt to block access to the EU market in a situation where they require a break-up of Facebook and Facebook refuses to comply. It would require the EU to implement a draconian Chinese firewall to bring into full effect.

The EU is 250m of Facebook's 2.2 billion users. They could easily drop all EU business if they needed to (the business operations within the EU is the easiest aspect for the EU regulators to target). Their profitability would drop from ~$23 billion for 2018 to $19 billion or so at worst. That'd be made-up for with one year of growth. Once Facebook's business operations in the EU are shut down, Facebook could continue to operate the user accounts and leave it to the EU to attempt to censor what their population is allowed to access online.

Watching the EU attempt to install Chinese style repression and censorship to limit what its people can access online, would be quite the comical circus.

If userbase was their only concern, Facebook would likely not have responded to the EU Parliament's request for interview.

Facebook is still registered in Ireland, since 2010, which is still in the EU, making Facebook an entity subject to them. (Ireland has also expressed a desire to rejoin the EU, post-Brexit).

The sovereign state called "The Republic of Ireland" is not leaving the EU as part of Brexit.

The sovereign state called "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is leaving the EU as part of Brexit.

The sovereign state named Eire, technically.

baby steps ...

Ireland is not leaving the EU. Maybe you 're referring to northern ireland, but facebook is not there.

>It would require the EU to implement a draconian Chinese firewall to bring into full effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...

Quite a few countries in the EU have already ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, and the EU last year made it easier for ISPs to do so. So the capability is there, and there's precedent. TPB responded by decentralising but that isn't an option for Facebook, they wouldn't dare to anything to get round a continental ban: and even if they did it would have to be 100% effective, if 50% of people can't figure out how to change DNS settings to get around ISP blocks then the other 50% will likely migrate to another platform too.

I said to a friend a few weeks ago that I actually want to see FB get blocked in Europe. The shitshow would be glorious.

> The shitshow would be glorious.

At which point does the shit show turn around and reflect bad on the EU though? I m no fan or user of facebook but it would be too serious a restriction that only dictators have taken so far. EU's problems with facebook so far are taxation and privacy. The second is presumably solved by GDPR. Even if the first one is solved somehow, i feel these MEPs were more concerned about political implications.

If facebook does not submit to the law, then the EU's options are to either block facebook and seize their assets or let everyone know that its a free for all and laws dont matter. If you want a solid rule of law, you cant just let people openly flaunt it

>That'd be made-up for with one year of growth

Would it? Facebook has 2.2 billion users out of 7 billion people total, and not all of those users are worth the same to Facebook. The US and the EU have more valuable users solely because those users can spend more money and are more valuable to advertisers. A lot of people on the planet who arent on facebook anymore cant even run facebook.

Its not like everyone has a new flagship phone every year, and its not like everyone on the planet has internet access. China is also not gonna be an easy target for them to crack since China pushes their own countries industries first.

I really dont believe that facebook could just grow to paper over their loss of the entire EU at this point

>Watching the EU attempt to install Chinese style repression and censorship to limit what its people can access online, would be quite the comical circus.

I don't like China's censorship either, but if the other option is for foreign companies to come in and abuse your citizens, then blocking out those companies doesn't seem like a terrible idea

>"The US will be keen to protect homegrown global monopolies."

I don't believe the US will be "keen" to protect FB if that's in fact what you are stating here. There is just as much concern about FB in the US as there is in the EU, even if the political will to act might be blunted in the US by lobbyists and money.

I would argue that FB isn't a "US monopoly" per se but a global monopoly.

I doubt many US politicians or citizens are concerned enough about Facebook to take any meaningful action. A bill like the EU's GDPR would not even get a vote in the US congress.

>"I doubt many US politicians or citizens are concerned enough about Facebook to take any meaningful action."

You might want to re-read my comment where I say there is no political will on account of lobbying and money.

US Citizens are just as concerned as EU citizens about FB. Especially given FB's role in the last US Presidential elections.

What is your justification for asserting that US citizens are not as concerned as EU citizens?

> What is your justification for asserting that US citizens are not as concerned as EU citizens?

If a significant amount of them cared it would be reflected in the user numbers.

And if you had actually looked at those user numbers you would have seen that Europe has far more FB users than the US. Europe has 370 million FB users compared to 239 million in the US:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-q4-2017-earnings/

i meant that there was no change in those numbers recently

Can you provide a citation that demonstrates a significant deletion of FB user accounts form EU citizen compared to the US?

thats what i m saying - there isnt any. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/04/number-active-faceboo...

Not OP but I'm also very skeptical something like GDPR would pass in the US. While people may be concerned about social media, polls show the majority of people are not in support of adding more regulation on the industry:

https://springboardccia.com/2018/04/17/icymi-wsj-nbc-poll-fi...

WSJ/NBC Poll respondents say social media platforms are… regulated too much: 14% have the right amount of regulation: 37% not regulated enough: 37%

It's for a good reason too - consumers have noticed they have more choices and freedom than in industries that are highly regulated by the gov. Laws like GDPR would make large swaths of business models useless - such as free games or apps the rely on targeted advertising. Since under GDPR, you cannot ask someone to either allow ads to be personalized or pay for the app (it has to be without detriment), tons of tools people otherwise enjoy would suddenly become paid only or disappear. Not to mention the effect it would have on the startup economy - it would be a big deal. Can't see it happen here.

And if you actually read the WSJ article it states:

>"Some 37% of people in the new survey said social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are not regulated enough, while the same share said the sites have the right amount of government regulation, and 14% said there was too much regulation."

So its actually pretty evenly split between the "not regulated enough" and "have the right amount of regulation."

I think its fair to say that the 14% that said "there was too much regulation" of social media when in fact there is virtually none are simply doctrinaire anti-regulation Republicans who don't support regulation of any kind anywhere. So the fact that they were specifically being asked specifically about social media is basically irrelevant.

Gerrymandering creates the impression US citizens don't care as much - in fact, they've been cut out of the loop. You're definitely right about the majority of U.S. politicians, their gerrymandered districts are safe; they need only worry about donors' interests.

The EU, by trying to impose their will on the rest of the world, will see their power slip through their hands. The EU as a political structure is tenuous at best, with too much control being wielded by a few members. All it will take to break up the EU is a better deal extended to a few weaker members. Trump may decide to do this just to watch Europe burn.

It was frustrating to not get any answers. But actually that tells us everything we need to know.

I think you make a good point. I think many people came to the same conclusion after he testified before the Senate in the US. I think it's it quite damaging to dissemble the way he does by moving his mouth without ever answering the question that was asked. And to do this for hour after hour an even in response to simple "yes" or "no" questions is nothing short of a farce.

I have to wonder what his employees back in Menlo Park think when they watch their CEO shoveling such obvious bullshit.

People do keep wondering whether he will run for an elected office, he is just getting in some practice first.

He would have to make a quantum leap in his development. If he keeps running scripts to address real people he'll fare at best as good as Hillary Clinton.

Yeah he made no effort to appease the audience or answer any pointed question. He rushed to leave, while during his US hearings he offered to stay longer a number of times. I think he was agitated by the questions in the end, even though he knows he ll probably face more regulation in europe.

It might be the case that he has already discounted that possibility and simply doesn't care if EU wants to ban facebook anymore.

There's a glimmer of hope in my heart, but I stopped caring about these hearings because nothing seems to ever come from them.

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