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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Dear EU, please add one (or more) zeros to these fines. If only a single tech giant gets fined out of business for repeatedly breaking the law the others will definitely notice.

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Notice what? To block EU users because it's too risky? Lol

I would actually be fine with this. There is nothing special to the American social networks, they will just be replaced by European alternatives.

“Fined out of business”?

Yes, why not? The EU can't revoke the corporate charter for entities that don't have the bulk of their presence in the EU but it can cause them so much grief that they will either abandon the EU or they will mend their ways. Apparently the fines imposed so far aren't nearly large enough.

Exactly. We should go a step further:

Let’s make the biggest social networks Meta, TikTok, etc incur fines in the tens of billions for every investigation of significant privacy violations (like Meta’s existing case) of its users and pay back their users in compensation over that until the company either changes or exits the market the regulators reside in. This is far better than a ban and the regulators and users get free cash out of it.

Given that we have the regular ‘all social networks do this’ excuses on collecting data, the standard for large social networks in the 1B+ daily active users collecting user data should have much larger fines in the billions.

Regulators destroying markets isn't the slam dunk you might believe it is. Why not fine GSK out of existence any time someone dies from a mislabelled allergen? Even though that is far worse than data being processed in the wrong country (not even being mishandled, just the increasing chance of mishandling) it wouldn't be proportionate.

And also because that action has consequences on the world stage. Deliberately harming one of your ally's largest businesses isn't something I expect will be tolerated indefinitely since it's a diet sanction.

You have the victim/perp relationship mixed up I think. Facebook does harm. They are the perp. The EU data subjects are the victims and the 'world stage' is exactly why this sort of transnational company should adapt to local legislation.

The idea that it 'wouldn't be tolerated' suggests - correct me if I read this wrong - that the country where the company originated would then do some kind of tit-for-tat with companies from the other country. But: where were those comments when VAG and other car manufacturers broke the law in the US? (and probably elsewhere too?). My position hasn't changed, they deserved their comeuppance as much as FB does right now.

It's all about framing. If the US agrees that this is bad actors getting rightfully punished for violating local laws then it's all good. If the US looks at the regulation and decides that it's a very complicated ceremony to extract money from US tech companies then it becomes more complicated. And since FB isn't violating US law and the US passed the cloud act I think that this is relatively likely. This court case is effectively a proxy war over the cloud act because meta didn't actually do anything wrong, their actions became wrong in response to us law.

US law doesn't come into play, it's EU law we are talking about here.

'Meta didn't actual do anything wrong' -> they did.

Yes it does, the reason Meta's actions went from legal to illegal is because US law changed.

Facebook has worked the same way for more than a decade. First EU law changed and it was fine because the US and EU had a data sharing agreement, then US law changed. If you what Meta did wrong is not completely rearchitect Facebook in response to a US/EU squabble then your bar for right and wrong is really really low.

There's a lot of things you can point to that Meta does that are shady, but they thing they actually got fined for didn't have to do with any of them.

> Why not fine GSK out of existence any time someone dies from a mislabelled allergen?

Funny, this is essentially what happens with tobacco taxes. Cigarettes are prohibitively expensive and thus have caused that industry to falter in the US.

That's definitely not the same. Taxes aren't fines. Taxes may be market-destroying, if there's enough political will to make it happen, as with cigarettes, but they aren't capricious.

> Taxes aren't fines.

Technically, you're correct they aren't, but how realistically are they are any different? In both cases the government profits from a corporation's behavior.

Fines aren't capricious either.

I think they are to some extent, or these giant ones are. They look a lot more like "take advantage of local sentiment" or "make an example of this one" than taxes, which are applied uniformly.

Or "business expenses rose so the business stopped being viable in this contract jurisdiction"

Yes, because obviously the government should play king maker with companies. What could possibly go wrong? Governments are definitely infallible and make the best decisions based on non biased information. I suggest they take an annual popular vote on which company to fine out of existence each year, that will surely get good results.

No, businesses should comply with the law. If all businesses comply with the law it's a level playing field so there is no 'king making'. There is the obligation of the government to take care of those that try to upend the board in order to win.

Facebook employs lots of people in Ireland, they don’t want them out of business.

Ok, so if a company employs enough people they get to break the law at their discretion?

Imo discretion remains with the public, but yes, corporations can arguably get away with more illegal things if they have more weight

Not saying it’s right

<10k people is not a lot in a half a billion people block

Can’t speak for the rest of Europe but if the Irish DPC put Facebook out of business it would be seen as a massive financial own goal by most of the Irish electorate.

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