EU GDPR and Antitrust Fines
The cluster discusses EU regulatory fines, particularly under GDPR and competition laws, imposed on large tech companies like Google and Meta, emphasizing their calculation as percentages of global revenue and debates on their adequacy and impact.
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European companies are hit with fines if they misbehave:https://www.statista.com/statistics/1338745/competition-poli...
Aren't some of those GDPR fines based on the parent companies revenue too?
Yes. See GDPR (max fine 4% of global annual revenue) or the new EU Digital Services Act (max fine 6% of global annual revenue).These are both fairly new laws, if you look at the laws they replace (which themselves may not even be that old), the fines are a huge leap up.
GDPR fines can accomplish this.
There's nothing really stopping the EU from making the fines larger if they don't correct their behavior. The point of a fine like this isn't to completely cripple a company, but to make it understand that there are very real consequences.It's very simplistic to look at their yearly revenue and say they can just absorb it. If the money they made off of an activity like this was less than the fine, absorbing it won't make sense.
Fines would work if they were a substantial amount instead of what they are now. Look at the EU fining Google $2.7 billion. If the fine is more than the amount made doing something illegal, companies would think twice.
The GDPR law in the EU allow us-companies to be fined: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2007530-how-the-eu-ca...
You're talking about stuff (presumably) happening in the US, but GDPR is an EU law. The regulatory landscape in the EU is rather different. The law also says that fines must be "proportionate". It is not, as a general rule, the goal of courts to bankrupt businesses, but rather to incentivize compliance.
So you think the EU doesn't account for more than 4% of their worldwide revenue? It's not like the fine is for 100%.
That sounds like something fairly trivially avoided by having the punishment be proportional to revenue. And I believe this is already the case for GDPR?A quick search indicates "Up to €20 million, or 4% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher" https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/fines-and-penalties/