[noirscape]

It's a case involving their European customers.

If you do business in Europe, there's a bunch of (good!) privacy regulations you have to comply with. One of these is that you're not allowed to transfer the data to a jurisdiction that doesn't follow equivalent protections to the GDPR[0]. TikTok transferred European user data to their Chinese servers, which is a pretty obvious no-go, since the Chinese government is an authoritarian watchdog that inherently can't guarantee these protections (as the GDPR also applies to transferring data to the government.)

Ireland has jurisdiction because the EU offers something called the "one stop shop" concept, where a foreign company can declare that they have EU headquarters in a specific member state, and from that point on the only EU regulations they have to directly worry about are how they're implemented in that country in specific[1]. Every major tech company is therefore in Ireland because the country is small enough to essentially steamroll local politicians with lobby money, leading to very lax enforcement until the EU starts applying pressure.[2]

[0]: This also causes issues with data transfers to the US, and in the most extreme interpretation, makes it so that you probably can't do business with both Europe and the US at the same time in the first place. This is because of the CLOUD act, which goes across jurisdictions and is something the US government can use to compel any service provider to hand over data.

[1]: Of course, a country can still have it's own laws that a company can run afoul of on top of that.

[2]: Other countries with this issue are Luxembourg (Fintech companies love Luxembourg because they can just hire all the good lawyers, meaning you can't negotiate legal disputes there effectively) and the Netherlands (which is a EU-based tax haven for large corporations that aren't in either sector.)

[fidotron]

> Every major tech company is therefore in Ireland because the country is small enough to essentially steamroll local politicians with lobby money

No, it's because Ireland had a very low corporation tax with the strategy of becoming the preferred HQ for foreign companies in the EU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republi...

"By 2018, Ireland had received the most U.S. § Corporate tax inversions in history, and Apple was over one–fifth of Irish GDP. Academics rank Ireland as the largest tax haven; larger than the Caribbean tax haven system."

[docdeek]

Do you know if there is a reason they would not domicile in Malta? It's an EU Member State, English speaking, and if buying off politicians in Ireland is easy, it must be easier in Malta with a population of only 550,000 people.

[jdietrich]

Malta is simply too small to accommodate the European headquarters of a major tech company. It's not enough to just put a brass plaque on a door - you need to actually run your EU operations primarily in that country. Meta and Google have thousands of staff in Ireland.

Malta is (along with Gibraltar) a preferred destination for gambling operators.

[noirscape]

My guess is just physical/lazy reasons. Before this, they were homed in the UK, whose special arrangements meant that they could avoid a lot of EU regulations that way.

Then Brexit happened and they just moved to the nearest available option.

[rsynnott]

Yeah, this is pretty ahistorical; most multinational tech companies already had their EU headquarters in Ireland before Brexit. A lot of companies _did_ move operations from the UK to Ireland (or sometimes the Netherlands) as a result of Brexit, but it was mostly financial and insurance companies (plus some pharma, medical devices etc), and those didn't generally move their headquarters if they weren't already in Ireland.

[diffuse_l]

I'm pretty sure Ireland was home to a lot of global corporations EU headquarters way before brexit...

[trollbridge]

Malta is no longer trying to be an "offshore" destination with lax regulations.

[rsynnott]

> Every major tech company is therefore in Ireland because the country is small enough to essentially steamroll local politicians with lobby money

It's more about taxes and an efficient well-understood legal system (similar to the Delaware advantage on the latter). While the DPC used to be kinda useless, it has somewhat gotten its act together, and today issues most of the big GDPR fines. If you were trying to specifically avoid GDPR scrutiny, you'd locate elsewhere.