Mark Zuckerberg seems to have grown tired of waiting for Elon Musk to throw down and is now “picking a fight” with the European Union. Obviously, not in the literal sense (for now). Just a few days ago, Threads was launched almost worldwide to compete with Twitter. Yes, “almost worldwide,” because European citizens cannot download the app (at least not officially) due to the privacy regulations that Meta would have to face.
While the new Digital Markets Act, the EU’s new antitrust regulation, won’t come into effect until 2024, companies like Google have already delayed the launch of products like Bard, their AI chatbot, to avoid future issues. In the case of Threads, Meta has done something similar, but with a rather… interesting strategy.
In an interview with Voa News, Diego Naranjo, the policy lead for the advocacy group European Digital Rights, suggests that Meta wants to offer Threads to the rest of the world and deny it to Europe only to make Europeans angry with the EU, leading them to put pressure on the EU and potentially soften the future law. “We’ll see who loses more,” Naranjo says. “In my opinion, Meta will lose more by not having 450 million potential customers on their network.”
Of course, it’s just a theory, as Zuckerberg, unlike Musk, doesn’t usually publicly disclose his intentions behind every action he takes. However, it’s not an entirely far-fetched idea, to say the least. Regardless, Naranjo believes that Meta’s strategy is bound to fail, although the final outcome of this battle could set precedents in the relationship between tech giants and the EU.
For now, Meta does not deny the possibility of launching Threads for European users in the future, and the majority believes that it will eventually lift this self-imposed restriction, at the latest, in the coming months. With a balance seemingly tilted more in favor of the EU than Meta and other tech companies, it is highly likely that, as is often the case, Zuckerberg will eventually have to comply with the future European law and fall in line.
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