While I am in favour of efforts like the GDPR to protect users data, I wonder if all this anti-bigtech sentiment is actually justified and where it will eventually lead to
Maybe the lines of business which require promiscuous data sharing in order to be profitable will stop operating in the EU, and give rise to other business models. Whether these newer ones will be better or worse is not yet known, though the gamble in the EU is that it won't be worse.
The GDPR applies to smalltech, too, and smalltech gets fined. For example, an individual got fined €600 about two months ago for pointing a video camera at a shared access road (https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-1397)
You can find many more examples of small fines at https://www.enforcementtracker.com/.
It's about anticompetitive behaviour, i.e. antitrust. Antitrust is not particularly about tech companies, and it has been around a long time, since before modern computers.
It's about misusing a position of market dominance to prevent a healthy competitive market from operating. Very large companies which are market-dominant face this problem, but they also have the resources to understand and handle the responsibility. They can either do so, or face fines and injunctions to make them do so. In severe cases they can be forced to break up dominant business units, such as happened with the breakup of AT&T in the USA some years ago.
This is the same sort of thing as might have blocked nVidia from buying ARM, for example (until nVidia pulled out voluntarily). You can see how that has nothing to do with GDPR; it wasn't even in the EU.
I'd say they might need to revise that. I think Google just saw a 4 billion euro reduction in profit.
- common carrier status for “platforms”
- PII laws, broadly
It's a shame that this fine is too generous to Google and it won't scare them. It should be much larger than that and should be in the multi-billions of dollars.