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Comment by hamburglar1 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook generates this much free cash flow in 3 days.

This is irrelevant

Well, when each country does that it becomes economically unfeasible. Such fines work and work very well, once FB realizes that they lose more money from unethical behavior than they make, they'll stop it. I don't believe that any corporation is evil. I do believe that there are temptations to do bad things in order to make money, even if short term. This corrects such behavior. Hopefully.

Please provide any proof they work at all. Facebook has been fined larger amounts previously and continues to receive more fines for violations of user privacy. I would say there is currently very strong proof in the real world against what you’re assuming is true. Until a fine is ~10% of their stock value they won’t even consider it. This might as well be free for Facebook.

Did you study the work of Ralph Nader and the auto industry? Or the history of tobacco industry? There are multiple examples when it worked in the past. I am quite confident that when abuse goes too far, the pushback is even bigger. I just don't want to oversimplify the issue and say that any big corporation or any IT giant is bad by nature. It's growing pains in my book.

Yeah I know all about Nader. What you’re talking about took decades of fines after those companies lobbied endlessly to avoid blame. I think you just supported my argument. Big tobacco companies literally couldn’t be fined enough to make a difference for 60+ years. I’d guess sunshine is more correlated than fines to preventing large corporations from doing awful things. I’m not sure why you’re shilling the opposite.

Even if we assume Facebook's leadership makes perfectly rational decisions, the reasons behind their unyielding behavior could very well be non-financial - saving face, internal office politics, standing ground hoping the push from the regulators will fizzle out, waiting for legal loopholes to be discovered, or simply feeling of "we know better"

It's not.

It's a clear demonstration to FAANG and others that nine-digit fines are on the table even in Ireland - the country that tech corporations love the most because of tax advantages, the country long criticized for pandering to said corporations instead of fulfilling their data protection obligations.

If they don't fix the issue they get a bigger fine next time.

May be so, but that is not net cash assets. They expected 3 times less. A better measure would be how long does Facebook need to set aside 225m net in the emea market.

Under the GDPR, fines can be up to 4% of world-wide revenue. I think the 225m fine should be seen as a first warning.

There is scope under the GDPR for much larger fines if the misbehavior continues.

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