It's easy to say this in the HN bubble where most of us probably don't use Meta's services and dislike what they stand for (walled gardens, pervasive tracking,

It's easy to say this in the HN bubble where most of us probably don't use Meta's services and dislike what they stand for (walled gardens, pervasive tracking, etc), but in the "real world" Meta's services are still hugely popular in Europe. Depressing as it sounds, EU residents losing access to Facebook and Instagram due to EU regulations would probably materially increase levels of Euroscepticism in certain countries. That's not to say the EU wouldn't shrug at it anyway. EU institutions are notoriously slow to react to basically anything, which can be both good and bad. That's probably the bigger difference - if a car factory threatened to leave, it might be able to convince a local authority to grant it planning permission or whatever small thing it was asking for. But expecting the EU to overhaul its flagship privacy regulation to keep your business is a very, very big ask. (For the record, I don't actually think this is a threat - as others have pointed out, these filings are very conservative when it comes to disclosing potential risks.)