There was a lot of noise a few years back about Meta getting billion-euro fines over GDPR violations.

I looked it up: they paid almost none of the fines.

If you get a ticket from a speed camera, the government will garnish your wages if you don’t pay the fine. For trillion dollar organisations payment is apparently optional.

No. For example:

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-3171 Yangoo. UAE.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-1912 Criteo. French.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-3162 Intesa Sanpaolo. Italian.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-2864 Shein. Chinese.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-2306 Enel Energia. Italian.

American companies fines tend to be highest since they are biggest and revenue affects the fine amount.

Depends. Do you go and read European news about such cases, or just check HN when they post about a FAANG EU fine?

No, they also fine American companies in China and in Australia.

Fines like these are not an absolution though

It's like taxes with extra steps, except you get taxed for someone polluting you!

Except for the consumers of course, but who cares about them.

That % should increase substantially with each violation too. It's hard to make fines hurt when the corporation you want to punish has more money than most countries.

> They can’t fine enough to actually change the behavior of big companies

Of course they can fine enough. They just don't, which is why you see companies get fined again and again profiting from each violation.

The real issue is that fines are hard to set against companies with more money than they could ever need. What we need is for more CEOs to go to prison, but that's hard to do when the company's CEO is a citizen of another country.

Can you think of even 10 notable cases of startups being killed by fines? Let alone the 1,000+ you would need to identify to justify the claim.

I can't think of a single one. It barely registers as a risk.

Although I can think of several US startups that bankrupted themselves with fines for fraud etc....

> they can fine enough to kill their own startup culture

But they don't.

Exactly

They should multiply by 100 and then by another 100 with each violation. That'd help prevent companies from racking up fine after fine after fine. The real solution is to lock executives behind bars, but if the CEO is a citizen of another country you're kind of stuck with fines and bans

They just need to ban these companies from operating in their countries. They are fundamentally burdens on society run by bad people.

Your best case scenario with fines is getting them into the narrow definition of compliance just until a new "innovation" gives them a different way to conduct the same abuse while evading the letter of previous judgments.

there might be an oversight component of the settlement that is not prominent in the press releases

If you're not doing so already then you seem to have already agreed to let Google do quite a lot of things with your data.

You may want to point your ire at the right parties, because that is not a GDPR demand.