EU opens investigation into Instagram and Facebook over failure to comply with DSA rules – IT Pro – News

A nice idea, but only on paper, the entire backend of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram are the same and can therefore not simply be separated, one of the reasons that the company was not split up earlier. It was literally part of Mark and his friends’ defense when the US government considered reversing the purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp.
So splitting up the companies now is not something that they can do right away and the costs that the individual companies would then incur are so extremely high because many of the systems would have to exist three times, something that has been undone in order to control costs .

There is also a big problem with the idea that you pick out the adds and place them separately. That group would then almost immediately become the rich club of the holding company and therefore gain an unreasonable amount of power, something that would not be healthy for the other parts of the holding company.

The chance that Meta would voluntarily split the company along the lines of the former independent companies and place the part that generates the money in its own company is simply not reasonable.

What Meta would probably rather do is have a good conversation with the decision makers within the EU, perhaps on a Caribbean island in an extremely expensive restaurant. Something will probably also be said about investments in new data centers in Europe and a development hub somewhere in an area where Europe would like to create high-tech jobs. There will certainly be a lot of lobbying money thrown at it here and so on. If Meta thinks it is financially better to pay privately, then the EU will probably be willing to do so and this will all fizzle out.
If Facebook thinks it probably won’t make much difference, they will still try, but with less enthusiasm (and therefore less money).

In any case, the EU will benefit from this story and Meta will hardly notice anything because they really knew what they were doing when they decided not to spend the money to comply with the laws. It was thought that it would be financially better to do it this way than to follow the expensive laws.