57MM$ is nothing to Google. They've escaped even antitrust cases with minimal injury, it would be a truly shocking event if the EU actually managed to touch them.
"The more serious infringements go against the very principles of the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten that are at the heart of the GDPR. These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher."
For Google that would be 4% of its worldwide annual revenue, I'd assume. Taking into account that it's not one infringement but multiple that could mean a pretty hefty fine.
In it's current form, yes. However, I'm not so sure that everybody here would agree that "the web today" is fundamentally better than the web ten years ago, technological advances aside. Everybody smelling gold and starting a blog to mindlessly shill for products in hopes of getting a commission, super low quality texts written/generated/spinned entirely for SEO reasons to place ads between the paragraphs etc doesn't come to mind when I ask myself "what could be better on the web?" If those things disappear tomorrow, I don't think a lot of us would miss them. We'd notice them being gone because it might feel like being able to breath freely after a strong cold, but I don't think many would miss them.
> But it will take a while until we start paying for news again, for example.
Plenty of people pay for news. They won't pay for Gawker or Buzzfeed though. I don't think that's a problem for anybody not invested in or working for those companies.
I paid $2K for my first GDPR consulting session for a $7K MRR app and was quoted ~$25K for consulting while I would personally implement what needed to be done. $25K is nothing for a large company, but it's prohibitively expensive for a lot of small companies. This cost also doesn't include the (probably hundreds of) man hours required to implement and certify GDPR compliance, which are also disproportionately valued when it's being done by 1 person in a <5 person company versus N people in a >5K person company.
Hopefully these costs will fall as more people become lawfully knowledgable about what GDPR entails and the market of people available to help grows. Unfortunately there's no "feel free to wait if you can't afford it yet" clause in GDPR.
The whole penalty system is quite silly. The fines destroy small companies who are the ones struggling to comply, and do little more than offer extremely gentle pokes on the wrist for megacorps that have relatively unlimited resources available for complete compliance, if they actually wanted to comply.
That's why, IMO, GDPR sucks for small businesses that can be outed to the ICO for a minor oversight and not so much for big data abusers that can take on GDPR and come out unscathed.
A quick search indicates "Up to €20 million, or 4% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher" https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/fines-and-penalties/
Google has come out of antitrust cases relatively unscathed. They've even violated GDPR itself once before explicitly, and got out with a 57MM$ fine. This case won't be any different than all the other times that Google has blatantly violated laws and walked away with a slap on the wrist.
I would be very very very shocked if the EU actually managed to touch Google. I welcome and hope to be proved wrong.
If the law literally doesn't work because of reasons, then that's just systemic corruption.
It's a lot of regulations that can be worked around and the fines are hard to and rarely enforced. There are a bunch of poster children of GDPR fines that make it seem like it's doing a lot but the principal abusers (i.e. Google) just walk away with a light slap.
It needs the ability to be enforced, and I think this much should be obvious to lawmakers -- a law that can't be enforced well is useless.
That's why I'm calling it privacy theater. It's the EU saying "look what we did!" but in practice it doesn't really do much without enforcement that still does not exist both at a national and global scale.