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How can the EU break up foreign monopolies?
by zerostar07 8y ago
How can the EU break up foreign monopolies?
- GreeniFi 8y agoThat’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.
- ianai 8y agoThere 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.
- zerostar07 8y agoyeah but that's not a break-up
- ianai 8y agoSo 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.
- zerostar07 8y ago> Ie the government gives you a citizen entry and only they may produce such information thats a tad dystopian don't you think?
- vntok 8y agoGovernments are accountable to their people. Companies are accountable to their shareholders.
- zerostar07 8y agosome are
- ianai 8y agoNo, dystopian is the current situation.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoIsn't FB still an Irish corporation? As in, an EU company?
- zerostar07 8y agoyeah but FB can shut that one down if needed and serve europe from the US.
- adventured 8y agoThey 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.
- shakna 8y agoIf 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).
- SeanMacConMara 8y agoThe 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.
- disgruntledphd2 8y agoThe sovereign state named Eire, technically.
- SeanMacConMara 8y agobaby steps ...