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Comment by Yujf | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that this is revenue, not profit AND it is a fine from the EU so really only EU revenue should be counted when discussing how hard this hits Meta.

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This implies that Meta doesn't make money outside of EU by exfiltrating EU users' data.

If Meta made zero money in EU whilst still offering a service to EU users, and still exfiltrating their data, should the fine be zero?

Even if the calculations for how to attribute income from different places would be difficult to decide upon precisely, and doubly so if the calculations are used to determine a penalty fine thanks to the possibility of being gamed, it can probably be guessed at without too much error in cases where Goodhart's Law doesn't bite.

How does anyone make money with EU data outside the EU? Seems like the value of that data is trivial anywhere else.

> a fine from the EU so really only EU revenue should be counted

You can't really fully seperaten EU revenue. I as a European write very intelligent and relevant posts on Facebook, thus people from other regions go there to read them. (well, I don't post anything on Facebook these days, but the point stands)

Meta revenue is from showing an ad. "Is the ad shown in the EU?" seems like a pretty clear line. IFRS rules already require tracking the action that recognizes revenue so seems hard to play games with it.

It should hit the global revenue. Otherwise they could play even more regionally with the rules, and fines are just a cost of doing the business.

Yes the fine should be based on global revenue, but when discussing if this fine actually hurts Meta, you should try to estimate the EU revenue, because it is about if it Meta cares about the fine. If it is a significant part of EU revenue then Meta should want to comply or leave the EU. If it is not then Meta doesn't care.

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