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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Letter sent to Meta: https://www.datatilsynet.no/contentassets/36ad4a92100943439d...

1 mill NOK (~$100k) daily fine if breached.

Aside but: The kerning (?) used in that letter is absolutely awful.

That was my first thought too but perhaps that's just part of the punishment: Having to follow that document to the unevenly spaced letter.

Generated by Microsoft Word, of course

Kerning¹ concerns pairs of characters; tracking² adjusts spacing over a range of them. What you’re seeing here is a consequence of text justification³ warping the text. Justification is rife with problems such as rivers⁴ and hard to get right.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_spacing

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Justifie...

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)

It looks fine for me, but I'm on macOS, which comes with all the Windows fonts, including Times New Roman. What you're seeing might be due to your system not having a copy of that font? (PDFs can embed fonts, but don't necessarily.)

It's like imposing 5 shmeckels-a-day fine on an individual, it's a waste of time and money

~$30M a month, ~$3.6B a year, I'm not sure what's Meta's annual profit but it doesn't seem like a drop in the bucket (assuming it can actually get enforced)

~$3M month, ~$36M a year. Thats affordable :)

^ He did the math /s

$100k a day is $3m a month which is $36m a year.

Even if it were $30m a month, it would still be $360m a year.

facepalm, thanks for the correction

Norway has 5 million inhabitants, it sets the precedent for other countries to do something similar with fines scaled for their population. At that point it might start to hurt.

Meta makes about 25% of their revenue in Europe. Norway should be about 1-2% of the European revenue, so if we take the upper end of that. Norway should be on the order of 0.5% of their total revenue.

Meta's net income is about $6 billion / quarter. If we assume that revenue share translates to profit share, that means their profits from Norway are about $30 million / quarter, or about $300k / day.

So the fine is about a third of their profits from Norway. That seems like a pretty significant proportion. If such sums weren't significant, they'd not bother operating in Norway in the first place.

A fine for illegal behavior that is less than 100% of the profit from that behavior, is just a tax.

Fines that are ignored for too long typically increase or have other consequences.

Very cool if that happens. Coming from a US standpoint… here it often doesn’t go that way.

Why would they ignore it? If this is cheap for them, it just becomes the price of doing business as an additional tax.

"ignored" in this case means "paid without correcting the behaviour".

That is, if they openly just keep paying the fine instead of stopping, then the fine will continue to increase.

The real question is how much more do they make off of behavioral advertising. If it provides more than a 50% increase to revenue, they will keep it.

To say nothing of the very real possibility they may opt to lose money in Norway to fight this precedent there, as opposed to in a market like Germany or France.

> If such sums weren't significant, they'd not bother operating in Norway in the first place.

Not necessarily, given network effects it can be advantageous to operate it some markets at a loss if the network effects from that market helps you maintain market share in your profitable markets.

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