This reads less of a threat from Meta, and more of outlining all possible outcomes in an annual report - one they have to do, else risk shareholders suing, and winning, in the extremely unlikely case they would restrict some of their product offering in Europe as a flex. This is similar to how, if you read S1 filings, they will list all possible things that could go wrong, and ways the business can stumble, for the same reason.<p>Meta is reasoning how they would be unable to do cross-region ad targeting with the current regulation.<p>None of what they write has anything to with Instagram or Facebook's ability to operate. It all has to do with how accurate and profitable Facebooks' cross-region ad targeting would be.<p>An underlying story not reported by Mashable is how the increasingly restrictive EU regulations do, in fact, present more cost and headaches for all companies operating globally. For any small and medium-sized business, it's increasingly not economical to implement adhering to regulations themselves: and it increasingly makes sense to use middlemen who provide these services - from payments processing to user data storage.<p>It feels we're entering a time when operating globally will mean investing resources and custom development to operate within the regulations in the EU, in India (also pushing for more EU-style regulations) and in China (a different beast altogether). The regions who have not yet implemented similar regulations and are more of an "operate however you want" model are the US, Canada, LatAm and Africa.