Interesting how the article kinda meanders between not-quite-saying that Elan is doing manly brinkmanship and is ready to make a rational business decision, and not-quite-saying that Elan is the dysfunctional captain of a soon-to-be shipwreck.
Ugh. I've been saying for years that the EU Commission's approach would eventually lead to stuff like this but nobody was willing to listen. The assumption EU bureaucrats and "EU citizens" make is that there are no limits to the punishment beatings executives will take to avoid bans in large geographical areas. This isn't actually true and has never been true, but for some reason a lot of people are in denial about it. The stream of tech firms giving up on China should have been a wakeup call, the way new products like Bard and Threads launched with EU blocks in place from day one should have been another.<p>The EU is barrelling head first towards being a tech backwater. Unlike China it probably isn't going to implement internet censorship muscular enough to stimulate a set of competent home grown competitors; the Commission always likes to make other people do its dirty work so they'll expect the products themselves to do blocks but the incentives to make those blocks stick aren't really there beyond tickbox compliance. People stuck in member states will just use VPNs or other workarounds, and nobody will pony up the sums needed to build genuine competitors. In turn this means that the EU won't develop home grown replacements to unavailable services or any of the other products people already use, because it's just far too risky to invest the huge sums required when at any moment the Commission might arbitrarily change its mind (something it does regularly) or your target market just gets used to convoluted workarounds.<p>IMPORTANT: To all US tech firm employees reading this. Please remember that <i>not everywhere in Europe is in the EU</i>. The UK, Switzerland, Norway, Ukraine, Serbia, Iceland, Lichtenstein and a whole host of smaller countries are not. Over-blocking is already a big problem for people living in these countries due to things like the GDPR.