Facebook warned it may stop operating its core app and Instagram in Europe

[kerng]

Yes! A move like this would be very interesting experiment to see how power on Internet shifts and what's next to come

[RealStickman_]

Very interesting indeed. I wonder whether other US companies would also pull their apps or instead rush to fill the gap facebook left.

[aritmo]

Eventually some great news!

[chillacy]

Title seems misleading in a way that the article itself seems to acknowledge, or at least the interpretation seems construed as a threat instead of a plea.

> "In the event that the Applicant [Facebook] were subject to a complete suspension of the transfer of users' data to the US, as appears to be what the DPC proposes, it is not clear to the Applicant how, in those circumstances, it could continue to provide the Facebook and Instagram services in the EU,"

[karmakaze]

That definitely reads better and is quite factual. The initial reading of the title as a threat gave me a chuckle.

[xaedes]

Do it.

[mrkramer]

They get around 25% of their revenue from Europe so they are willing to give that up for what?!

[jmfldn]

If only they would leave us alone. Seems unlikely.

[emsign]

So what? That's a dream come true.

[mbrodersen]

That would be most excellent. Please go ahead Facebook. Make my day.

[fred_is_fred]

How do we get this to happen in the US - hopefully before Facebook incites the next Civil War.

[NotSammyHagar]

Yeah, I was going to ask, is this a promise or a threat.

[Scoundreller]

They won’t stop anything.

[marta_morena_29]

Ridiculous argument. All they need to do is to split their data centers into US and Europe and store all data for Europe in Europe only. This will likely mean a hard graph boundary between profiles in Europe/Everywhere Else. But still you would be able to communicate, add friends, etc.

Lame threat that hopefully the EU will call upon.

[sontek]

I spent 2 years working on the infrastructure for a large silicon valley company to make it so we could do geo located data while maintaining a good experience for the user and when I left we had never completed the project.

1. If you want seamless auth, how do you want to handle this? Do they go to eu.facebook.com and authenticate that way?

If you geo locate the user to give them the proper authentication, what happens to a US based traveler who is in the EU?

2. Shared data. Lets say an EU person (whos data isn't allowed to go to the US) is friends with a US based person. We'd like to generate a feed of data for all that person's friends. Do we now have to query a DB in the EU? Is it ok to return that data to the US?

3. What about all the rest of the infrastructure around running an application:

  * monitoring
  * logging
  * error alerts
  * backups
  * operations access controls

Its a hard problem to solve if you are starting with a clean slate. Its a harder problem to solve when you're trying to retrofit a set of technology that may not have been designed for geolocated data.

[giovannibajo1]

It’s not ridicolous to call it impossible to do in 30 days. In fact, my startup with 10000 users wouldn’t be able to do it in 30 days!