Meta’s Threads Didn’t Launch In The EU: Is That Showing The Failure Or Success Of The Digital Markets Act?

As you almost certainly know, earlier this month, Meta released Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service. There are rumors that the company rushed the launch, pushing it up a few weeks to try to capitalize on the latest nonsense at Twitter. And, it seemed to work (to some extent) in that the company was able to quickly scale to 100 million signups in just a few days. Of course, it had help. This was all piggybacked on the Instagram social graph, which has over 2 billion users.

Still, one thing that likely held back even wider adoption was that Meta barred EU residents from using Threads. While many people assumed that this was due to a lack of GDPR compliance (since the GDPR is the EU law many Americans are most familiar with), it was pretty clear from the beginning that the actual culprit was the upcoming DMA, or Digital Markets Act.

While we've talked a lot about the DSA, or Digital Services Act, we haven't talked quite as much about the DMA, which is a similar kind of law, but focused on online marketplace." Whereas the DSA designates some platforms to face stricter rules by declaring them VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms), under the DMA, the similar designation is for Gatekeepers" and as a July 4th present, the EU named basically all the US big tech" companies as gatekeepers: Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. TikTok and Samsung were also named.

This means that additional rules regarding how those companies can launch new products will come into effect shortly, including blocking the ability to leverage data from one product to another, which seems to be what Meta is most concerned about.

I've spoken to a few EU legal and policy experts who say it's not at all clear that launching Threads in the EU would, in any way, violate the DMA, and Meta keeps harping on regulatory uncertainty" as a reason for why. One legal expert I spoke to on background noted that they thought this was really just a way for Meta to highlight some of the negative consequences of the DMA: letting the EU know that they're now second class citizens for new services.

Of course, EU policy makers are trying to spin all this as a good thing.

The fact that Threads is still not available for EU citizens shows that EU regulation works," said Christel Schaldemose, a Danish lawmaker, according to Politico last week. I hope Meta will make sure all rules are covered and complied with before opening up for EU citizens."

And, I guess your view on whether or not it's working for EU citizens, or punishing EU citizens, truly depends on (1) if you think having access to new services is important, and (2) if you think that complying with things like the DMA will actually do anything useful for folks in the EU.

Meanwhile, Meta is apparently going so far as to block EU users from accessing Threads while using a VPN to get around the geoblocking.

Don't try to sign up for Threads through a virtual private network (VPN) if you live in Europe. Meta has confirmed that it's blocking European Union users from accessing the new social network through a VPN. As consultant Matt Navarra explains, content, notifications and profiles won't load properly. Some users say they can use Threads without a VPN if they'd previously signed up with one, but you may not want to count on that loophole working.

In a statement, Meta says it's taking further measures" to stop people from accessing Threads in European countries where the app is unavailable. The company nonetheless says Europe remains a very important market" and that it hopes to expand availability in the future.

The fact that so many EU users were using VPNs to access Threads - at least enough of them to catch Meta's attention - certainly suggests they felt that it was more important for them to be able to access this new service than to be protected" by whatever requirements Meta is expected to put in place to comply with the DMA.

While I do think there are some interesting aspects to the DMA (especially around interoperability requirements, though it remains to be seen how well those will actually work), this seems to once again highlight the EU approach to tech regulation, being about restricting innovation until the bureaucrats say it's okay. You can argue that leads to safer outcomes, but it's hard to see how that will lead to better overall outcomes, as it will slow innovation down, and leave many in the EU cut off from services and features that the rest of the world enjoys.