Buried in Meta’s dense annual report for the Securities and Exchange Commission, filed Thursday, is a surprisingly stark sentence laying out a scenario in which The Company Formerly Known as Facebook might have to entirely stop operating Instagram and Facebook in Europe. Yep, no Instagram, no Facebook, for all Europeans.

o which we as Americans can only say: Luckyyyyyyyyyy!!!!

Source: Americans, get jealous: Meta threatens to shut down Facebook and Instagram in Europe

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, lost one quarter of its market capitalization value this past week.

The fundamental issue is that FB’s ad platform relies on an extensive surveillance network to build dossiers on everyone in the world – and to use that for targeted advertising.

But FB does not have control over as much data collection as they once did. Apple has made it more difficult for FB to collect data about users when using Apple products. Android has added enhanced privacy controls that limit what information apps can collect, and when they can collect it.

European laws on data privacy also threaten FB’s data collection.

FB’s competitive advantage was, primarily, the data collected to enable targeted advertising. Without that capability, FB’s valuation falls.

While some analysts think Meta’s share price fall is temporary, I do not share that view. I believe this is a fundamental, strategic issue that impacts Meta’s long-term strategy based on surveillance. This problem – that Meta no longer has control over the private source data collection – is a major issue for the company and not one that will be easily overcome. FB itself can continue as a business, but without the premium value of ads targeted to qualified buyers. (I am not so sure this approach was ever as good in practice as it was in theory.)