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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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

>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

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.

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