nah, Facebook is never going to literally go offline as it would be too disruptive, but it'll hopefully accelerate the push towards processing all European user data on the continent itself.
The lesson from this should be that regulation should be proactive. Privacy frameworks and safeguards to make sure EU citizens have EU protections ought to have been in place 10 years ago when these platforms were going global.
More likely you have to connect to EU servers from the US to view EU users. But this is not really any more complex than adding another sharding split. Since model weights and embeddings are widely considered to not be user data either (they are derivative works) I don't think the EU's requirements have any real impact to privacy or FB's ability to operate.
All this regulation will only entrench the big players who can afford expensive software engineers to run globally distributed systems that respect privacy regulations. You can't just spin up some servers in us-east-1 and focus on building your app now. Your data is still getting vacuumed up, just on the EU continent instead of in a US datacenter. But NSA/Five Eyes has everywhere wiretapped anyways so your data is equally as unsafe as it would be in a US datacenter.
Easy to be bullish but let’s not forget how much amazing technology has been created to support that “chat app”. Some of that tech was basically a paradigm shift. Some of that technology for sure is applied to projects solving energy storage or biotech.
To name a couple of contenders: react and cassandra. But there are dozens more.
This is the sad state of facebook. Their business is awful but the research coming out of there is top notch.
The lesson from this should be that regulation should be proactive. Privacy frameworks and safeguards to make sure EU citizens have EU protections ought to have been in place 10 years ago when these platforms were going global.