at worst, facebook will pull out of EU and close its irish HQ (but probably still be tracking users). Who won?

> Who won?

Whichever European social network replaces them.

Facebook is a freak social network considering how long it has survived. People used to migrate every one to two years.

> Whichever European social network replaces them.

GDPR makes it very difficult to touch user's private data for commercial purposes. that's the whole business of a SN so this is kind of precluded

Facebook has huge overheads because most of their engineering time is spent on all the creepy privacy violating things they develop and the infrastructure to run them.

If we start from scratch without all that it would be possible to make a profitable social network for a couple of bucks per month per user (or a tiered system, so heavy users or “influencers” would pay more while the base tier remains free).

The current social network business model was an innovation. Development of a new business model can and will happen again.

The European people, actually.

Could you elaborate?

I'm not the parent, but from my pov FB is a net negative for society, so if they are unwilling to play by our laws, then I'd rather see them get the fuck out.

They won't of course, because it leaves the market open for grabs.

If they leave the EU though they don't need to follow European laws or pay European taxes, but that doesn't prevent European users from continuing to use the actual website.

No, that's not true.

Due to trade agreements US companies have to follow EU law, for EU citizens, even of those companies don't have a presence in the EU.

In other words Facebook would have to block EU users.

i m a EU people. how would i win?

I’d win by another service for events popping up because facebook is gone. It’s nowadays the only thing I still need fb for.

There was a study recently showing that people that do not have Facebook account are happier :) Not to mention their personal data are not being abused.

i don't use facebook and i do agree its bad for egopaths. But i have some friends who use it to communicate with their family back in their countries and it's a valuable service for that reason.

Pretty easy to replace with a different service for that use case

If that happens, Europeans win.

Can you elaborate?