[latchup]

I am going to assume your question is genuine and not rethorical hyperbole.

Every sovereign nation has legal supremacy over its own territory. Any company doing business in the EU, no matter its origin, must follow EU laws inside the EU. However, these laws do not apply anywhere else (unless specified by some sort of treaty), so they are not forced to comply with them in the US when dealing with US customers.

If they still abide by EU law elsewhere, that is their choice, just like you can just choose to abide by Chinese law in the US — so long as it does not conflict with US law. If these rules do conflict with the first amendment, enforcing them in the US is simply not legal, and it's up to the company to figure out how to resolve this. In the worst case, they will have to give up business in the EU, or in this case, prohibit chat between US and EU customers, segregating their platform.

[SunshineTheCat]

I mean this (mostly) as a joke, however, I kinda wish US businesses would just firewall off the EU at this point (yes, I know this would mean losing some customers/marketshare and thus would never happen).

But the near daily proposals getting tossed out in their desperate attempt to turn their countries into daycare centers is just annoying to people trying to build things for other adults.

[disgruntledphd2]

> I kinda wish US businesses would just firewall off the EU at this point (yes, I know this would mean losing some customers/marketshare and thus would never happen).

This would involve them taking about a 30% hit to revenue (or more, depending on the company), so yeah, entirely implausible.

But, it's also worth noting that the US constantly does stuff like this. Like, the entire financial services panopticon of tracking is driven almost entirely by the US, and has been around since the 70s. Should the EU then wall off the US?

Personally, (as an EU citizen), that would really hurt if they did, but getting completely off the dollar based financial system would remove a lot of the US's control (and as a bonus/detriment reveal to the US how much of their vaunted market is propped up by EU money).

Most governments are bad, and these kinds of laws are international, so I'm not sure walling off the EU would make your life much better.

And let's be honest, you should expect the tech industry to end up as regulated as the financial industry over time, the only difference will be how long it takes to get there.