Meta’s threads short message service will not be launched in Germany and Europe for the time being. CEO Mark Zuckerberg (39) has not yet officially justified the decision, but is happy about more than 30 million global users in the first 24 hours. There are good reasons why people from the European Union are not offered the application for download in their Play or App Store – and currently there are no indications when this could change.
When the European Commission presented its proposal for the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in December 2020, the question quickly arose: How do the corporations, defined by the EU as so-called gatekeepers, react to the new regulations? Around two months after the DMA came into force, Meta provides a clear answer: for the time being, the European market is being completely abandoned.
A platform is considered a gatekeeper “if it has achieved annual sales of at least 7.5 billion euros in the European Union in the past three financial years or its market value is at least 75 billion euros and it sells more than 45 million a month in the Union established or resident end-users or had more than 10,000 business users established in the Union.”
In the case of Metas, it is also important to know that, according to its publicly available 2022 annual report, the group made more than 97 percent of its sales (around 113.6 of 116.6 billion dollars) with advertising. The argument: In order for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and now Threads to be available free of charge, they collect extensive user data in order to place advertising in a targeted and individualized manner.
Sometimes this principle goes too far, most recently in January of this year. The European Data Protection Authority in Ireland banned Meta from running ads on WhatsApp in Europe that were supposed to use data generated via Facebook and Instagram. And in the case of threads, too, the pleasure in collecting data is so great that it can hardly be reconciled with the DMA. Meta therefore announced shortly before the launch of Threads that the short message service would not be offered for download throughout the EU for the time being.
There has not yet been an official statement from Meta about the process, but experts currently assume that threads will not be published in the EU for the foreseeable future. Because Meta shouldn’t change anything about the principle that a Threads account is automatically linked to an Instagram account. A Threads account can only be deleted if the associated Insta account is also deleted. As the industry magazine “The Verge” reports, Meta is even considering letting its users download apps directly via Facebook apps in the future – as a kind of alternative to the Playstore and Appstore, with which certain regulations can possibly be circumvented.
Meanwhile, European users have already found workarounds to install the app on their smartphones: Android users download the APK file and use a VPN service; iOS users have to switch once to a country in the Appstore where Threads is available, such as the USA or Great Britain. However, the latter is only recommended to a limited extent, because in the worst case this practice can lead to an account lock by Apple.
So when Threads will come to Germany is currently not foreseeable. There is no official statement from the parent company Meta and the position of the European Union is unlikely to change any time soon. Accordingly, we can only hope that the stalemate will be resolved and that Meta and the six other companies identified by the EU as gatekeepers (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Microsoft and Samsung) will find and apply data protection-compliant solutions for their offers in a timely manner.
