Comment by juancn
5 months ago
From TFA:
X had not responded to a court request for information, the court added, ordering the company to bear the 6,000 euro ($6,200) cost of proceedings.
This looks like a Pyrrhic victory to me.
5 months ago
From TFA:
X had not responded to a court request for information, the court added, ordering the company to bear the 6,000 euro ($6,200) cost of proceedings.
This looks like a Pyrrhic victory to me.
That's the cost of the lawyers. If they did cost only 6.000 euros, that's actually a victory for the little man.
I think you're interpreting that that's the only outcome?
In Germany it's much harder to get money via lawsuit (vs the US), so that's kinda normal. If Twitter doesn't comply, the Staatsanwaltschaft will open a new lawsuit which will have a much bigger fine.
but yeah - 6k lawyers fee sounds like a joke, I guess it was a slam dunk case with very little time on the clock for the lawyers.
They just need to delay until after the elections and then pay the fine.
No, not Staatsanwaltschaft (public prosecutor). This is a private suit. Plaintiff can get some sort of injunction next, I presume.
Couldn't the violation of the DSA also lead to prosecution at the EU level?
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Not directly, yeh. I just skipped to the logical conclusion if they keep ignoring the ruling indefinitely.
But definitely not something that's going to happen within the next weeks, sorry if I made it sound like that.
Not really. 6k euros are only for taking court's time and flat-rate lawyers salary. (Imagine, in Europe average person may sue tech giants!) If x will not comply it will be forced, maybe even by some sort of receivership. The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
> The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
Let's say German court rules that X cannot operate in Germany. X decides to shut down any brick&mortar locations in Germany including any data centers located in Germany, but they do not stop Germans from accessing a public web service located outside Germany. What's the point? Will they then go after Germans continuing to use X?
In other words, a German court ruling against a non-German company can only go so far. However, IANAL, so willing to learn how a German court ruling would be anything other than a nuisance to a non-German company
Why the hypothetical given that X failed to follow court orders in Brazil just a few months ago, and then shut down their local offices?
X's website was blocked, and then the courts looked at how Musk operates his business interests and decided that Starlink was a valid recipient of the penalty fines, and Musk gave in.
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The Pirate Bay was also blocked in various European countries, enforced at the ISP-level. Sure, people can use a VPN, but the vast majority won't.
Also, ignoring the court order would be a possible violation of the DSA, which can be fined at 6% of a company's global turnover.
I could be erring but in some cases a German court order is enforceable across the entire EU.
No, they will simply ask internet providers to stop providing access to X to their users, and local DNSes (usually associated to these ISPs) to stop providing IPs associated with Twitter. This is nothing new, there's decades of prior art on copyright grounds.
Some edgy kids may use a VPN or something to bypass the ban, but 95% of people will simply move on to the next usable thing.
Another route is to tell financial institutions that payments to X must not be processed. That will immediately shut down advertising revenue from German companies, which will mean Germans will become less profitable users for X.
So... Yeah, Twitter may flout the ban, some users too, but most users and, more importantly, German banks won't.
They could block access to X from Germany (via DNS and removing apps from stores). Not hard to bypass, but certainly enough to make most people move on to another platform.
Can't they require it to be blocked in Germany/EU if they don't comply? I believe that's what Brazil did, isn't it?
The usual things governments will do is block payments to the company and order companies that are present in that country to stop doing business with the company in question. That means they'd lose their revenue from German users and disappear from the app stores in Germany.
Because of the nature of the DSA, Twitter would be failing to comply at a European level. Very worst case scenario (which probably will never happen) all European assets will be seized before they can be transfered back to the parent company to make sure fines will be paid. Some European employees might be caught for fraud and jailed. Obviously Twitter's domains would be blocked across the EU, though a cheap VPN is all you'd need to bypass that.
Musk may put himself in a rather awkward position, as the CEO of a company actively refusing court orders. He may be arrested and prosecuted for his actions, so it'd be unwise for him personally to visit his European offices. I'm sure he has committed some form of crime throughout the past couple of years they can jail him by.
In practice, we'd probably just see a short-lived domain block. Jailing Elon will probably set off Trump and his cronies so the EU will probably not bother to go after him.
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> What's the point?
The point is that Twitter makes money by advertising, and if they can't operate in Germany, they can't do business with German companies that want to use it to advertise. So it stops making money.
And if he doesn't comply, and continues doing so, contrary to court orders, they can also put injunctions against Starlink, start seizing Tesla assets, etc.
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