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Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

These fines are rare and the amounts are comparatively small. €120MM is peanuts to the EU. The intention of the fines is not to make money but to discourage illegal behavior.

Specifically, EU fines represent about 3% of EU revenue. The funds from the fines may not be used until the fine has passed all chances of being overturned by courts, which can take up to 8 years.

Finally: the fines reduce EU funding from member countries by the same amount. Even if the member nations decided to subsequently give more money back to the EU, there is a cap on how much money the EU can take.

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> The intention of the fines is not to make money but to discourage illegal behavior.

Of course fines are a revenue source, the EU operates on multiyear fixed budged which they supplement with fines and tariffs.

The bulk of that wealth transfer is reliant on the coffers of US companies.

Since this is basically all you post about, you're breaking this guideline:

> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not a battle it's a legitimate point of view. It's also backed by evidence.

Also I balance it with the variety in my submissions.

> The bulk of that wealth transfer is reliant on the coffers of US companies.

Please share your sources.

And, just assuming you are right, those coffers are full of untaxed revenue from EU markets.

The record fines were levied on US firms.

Are you suggesting that it's legitimate to fine US companies on antitrust grounds to supplement tax revenue?

It's legitimate to fine US companies breaking antitrust laws. If that happens to supplement tax revenue that's an extra benefit.

> EU fines represent about 3% of EU revenue

wow. Really?

You make that sounds like its insignificant, but it really isn't.

Fines that go in to the 'consolidated budget' for a country or region doesn't seem right; it's blatantly in their own interest to lay out fines, regardless of if the behaviour warranted it or not.

This seems very familiar to the US property seizure laws; the line between 'justice' and 'flat out corrupt' is fine, and there's significant financial gain to walking the corrupt side of the line.

I don't think this is anything to be proud of.

EU revenue isn't that high. The US Federal budget is $4,000b, the EU budget is $170b

Over 4.5 years, from 2013 to 2017, EU fines totaled nearly $10b. That's $2b a year, or just over 1% of the EU's total revenue.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/27/the-largest-fines-dished-out...

The EU just fined Google alone $5b. So clearly using past numbers is not an indication of their current or future intentions.

Fines don't increase the EU budget. Instead the contributions of the member states are reduced proportionally. The EU itself does not profit financially from fines and therefore I can't see even see a hint of a conflict of interest.

But anyway, fines going into the general budget is a very usual situation which poses no problem in a stable administration.

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