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i've always wondered where the money is going in those kinds of trials.

It's supposed to be a compensation for damages to the consumers, but are the consumers ever getting any money from the fine ?

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From my quick reading, it's a penalty, so it's not necessarily supposed to be a compensation, but a deterrent. So I guess the answer is that the money goes to "everyone", which is fine in my book (otherwise you have all the overhead of registering who gets what, which leads to a large chunk going to law firms).

Correct, the fines are those set in legislation and collected by the government. I suppose in the US you might say Google was found guilty of a "corporate misdemeanor"? I think the ACCC overlaps with some functions of the FTC; they are the investigator and prosecutor in such cases.

(It's worth noting that while Australia does have class actions for collecting compensation, here civil cases can never collect punitive damages so it's probably hard to extract a large sum from Google through that route in this particular case).

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