Rather oddly-written article; all that the DPC really said was that it won’t be launched on Thursday. As mentioned in the article, other Facebook services do change their behaviour in the EU to attempt to comply with the law, so it seems at least plausible that this one might, too, at some point.
Why do new services/platforms do incremental rollouts? I can understand they will have issues that need to be contained to a few users only, but that's the only reason I can think of.
As nation's try ever so hard to dynamite the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace & exert control wherever their citizens travel online, the difficulty in figuring out regulatory compliance keeps skyrocketing. It gets harder and harder to figure out how to meet each nation's requirements. And one nation's requirements for police access might conflict with another nation's requirements for data privacy. There's no international order, and 195 nations and countless provinces each get their say in making everyone trying to have a point of presence on the internet's life difficult.
If they want to keep good performance in different regions, they may wait for local infrastructure to be provisioned/configured first. Sydney-London has a guaranteed minimum 300ms latency for example, so if you care about the app being responsive, you may not want to expose people to that initially. (Not saying this is important to Threads or that it's the case here, it would be more important for games)
Interesting that they are launching in the UK, even though as far as I know our data protection legislation hasn't (yet) deviated from the GDPR so it should be just as illegal here as in the EU.
I guess they are banking on the uselessness and incompetence of the ICO.
The reasons for the gradual layout are not purely legal. But also technical, social and even psychological. Most bot farms are outside US and UK, but US and UK are the majority of popular users, and English-speaking audience, which is a key demographic for any social media, because most communication on social media is still in English and culture is biased heavily towards US/UK culture online.
So starting the app there provides "anchoring" for the culture on the app.
Also the app may have issues with complex mixed order writing systems and localization for all those additional countries, so following Paretto is great here, you get 80% of the target with 20% of the effort.
Also scaling a new platform from 0 to 100 in an instant is just a rookie thing to do, and Meta ain't rookies.
