Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrDresden | Hacker News Reader

Good they get fined, but those amounts really are peanuts for companies of that size.

You'd imagine(hope?) they might get more fines if they don't stop.

"In addition to the fines, the restricted committee ordered the companies to provide Internet users located in France with a means of refusing cookies as simple as the existing means of accepting them, in order to guarantee their freedom of consent, within three months. If they fail to do so, the companies will have to pay a penalty of 100,000 euros per day of delay."

So, 36.5 million per year of delay - perhaps that's affordable on their scale.

If they continue to refuse, the fines are unlikely to stop there.

Well, it's ~356 developers they could have paid for that year instead. If only France fines them that might be workable, but there are a lot of other countries in the EU...

GDPR allows fines up 4% of global annual turnover. So $3B for Facebook if the regulator wanted to.

This is not a GDPR fine, that (as of now - there's some push to change that in the future) can't be passed by France and would have to go through Ireland's regulating agency (since Ireland is the country chosen by Google) which has been not particularly willing to enforce GDPR against the major multinationals.

if I recall correctly, the fine scales up as time goes on up some (2?) percentage of company revenue. Like most people I would be happier seeing them get a several billion dollar fine right off the bat but so long as it eventually becomes unbearable that's good enough for me.

This is only France. How much money do you think Google makes in France? And there are a lot more EU members to go around, too.

Yes and no; percentage wise it's a dent, but it's still a lot of money.

It's enough money that they will probably employ / deploy a small army of lawyers to get them to reduce or dismiss the fine, or stall it for as long as possible. 150 million buys you a lot of lawyers' time.

Europe does fine differently than the US. The fines will increase dramatically and persistently for each continuing violation. It might eventually reach 4% of annual world-wide revenue - for each EU country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com