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Comment by tda | Hacker News Reader

Can someone do the math, how many seconds of profit is that for Google?

That's interesting but ultimately pointless, the way to look at this is as a signal: don't do this, it will be at least 600K per individual if you do it again. And knowing the way courts work a little bit that second violation is going to generate a lot more attention and a third is likely something that even the Google board would want to know about.

Don't ignore the courts or they will make sure you notice them.

No, it's 600k per individual that successfully pursues this to the point where government regulators step in. I'd say it's quite likely that for every individual that gets this acted upon, there's a significant number that either (a) never complain, (b) don't have the political pull to get the regulators interested or (c) simply can't pass the burden of proof despite being in the right.

The agencies that determine the fines tend to add zeros with every further violation. Feel free to experiment until you get tired of it.

I think the better question is how many person months of profit it is.

It doesn't make sense to punish people more for each offense just because they got together in a bigger group that does more things.

Actually it does. Finland calculates fines, e.g. speeding tickets, as a function of your income, otherwise the rich will treat them as a simple nuisance.

This is why I measure in person months and not dollars.

You fine the speeder a fraction of their income (person months), not a fraction of their entire support networks income (months). Doing the latter would tend to discourage people from forming large support networks (large companies).

But because they got together in a bigger group they can afford such fines easily and in order to be effective at all you need way stronger incentives.

It does make sense because fines also serve as a deterrent.

Sound like a case to be made for collusion

I think it is quite unlikely that the Gmail team had anything to do with the search teams decision here. Certainly I wouldn't expect them to be well enough informed about the legalities and the details of the case to be colluding.

Google spends ~2.5B in operating expenses per week, so that's a rounding error.

If anyone cares to look at a small number: 600 thousand divided by 2.5 billion is 0.00024. That's 2.4 percent of 1 percent.

It's time that courts come to terms with the amount of money companies now control. A 600k fine is quite large if an individual. For a large corp, it's a rounding error. If a court wants to signal they are unhappy with the behavior of a corp, then they really need to adjust their punishment. These corps have money that rival nation states, and should be treated as such.

Bear in mind this is for a single violation, not a widespread noncompliance issue. Considering the number of RTBF complaints Google fields (I believe it's north of a million by now), a large number of violations would ratchet up the costs significantly.

This is probably a good example of RTBF working as intended. For as loud as Google was opposing to it, they've done, on average, a reasonably good job complying with it (people who know me should know I do not give Google more credit than they deserve, ever), and penalties like this for individual failures seem reasonable for the impact on the individuals who file them.

RTBF for better or worse places the burden of deciding how to respond to a request on Google, not an independent judiciary. That cuts down a lot of red tape, but I think it also means the appeals process can't be too harsh on the penalty here: The trial court usually isn't penalized for being overturned on appeal.

And also a first violation of this kind for this court. A second one would likely not pass unnoticed. A case here in NL where a hospital first got warned then got fined a small amount and then got fined a - for that hospital - massive amount certainly put them on notice. That's an error that will not be repeated a fourth time.

It's pretty common to punish corps with a slap on the wrist followed by the threat of doing it again every few years if the behavior does not change.

The fine is equivalent to $5 and 57c comparing google revevue VS average US gross income.

What message is the court really sending?

> These corps have money that rival nation states

Rival? These corps can afford the best politicians that money can buy.

I was thinking that some of their engineers must be making more than that. Seems like a fine they will not even notice...

That is basically a senior engineer for a year.

Probably significantly cheaper once you factor perks, payroll tax, administrative overhead, etc.

11 seconds of revenue, maybe 45 of profit.

It is one case. Obviously the fine cannot be extreme. However GDPR fines can go up to 4% of revenue. But such a fine would be based on many users, not just one.

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