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Comment by Snafuh | Hacker News Reader

How much are they making in Norway? Why would global revenue/profit be relevant for a fine in Norway about Norwegian users?

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Because GDPR accounts for fines to be relative to global turnover https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/fines-penalties/

Is there an instance where this was actually applied?

We read about privacy related fines here and there, but none really seem to take into account the global revenue

As European I've lived through the crisis of 2008, when people were killing themselves due to lack of money and the only concern of EU was pleasing markets, save banks without any repercussions to those who caused all that pain, etc.

I am aware that EU is a PR stunt, probably will make some regulation here and there, but nothing exceptional, it's still a neoliberal/corporativist sewer at the end of the day

That doesn't mean it should always be applied. We shouldn't be attempting to annihilate companies. Just make sure the fine outweighs the benefit of doing something - just as we would with most fines.

I am not sure we shouldn't try to annihilate companies, is a good strategy, or at least not for any company, Meta is useless for society and constantly lying, stealing, omitting, exploiting, endangering, we shouldn't be willing to annihilate companies who make mistakes, probably we should aim to annihilate companies which consistently behave at the edge of civilization

I don't think it's up to you to decide if Meta is useless to society (which society? There are many). If it vanished it would be a huge problem for many societies. That implies it's not useless.

Of course it's not up to me, I am entitled to my opinion, it's implying that each phrase ends as IMHO (OR we need to make it explicit? Are we that bad? Can a single expose an idea that isn't his own?)

But yeah it's not up to me, but history is history

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64075067 or https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32018149/

I'm not in the mood of self-inflicting pain to go back to each scandal related to meta, but I guess these are quite heavy examples of the contribution of this company to society(ies?)

Sure, but what doesn't make the news is two billion people were able to communicate with infra that didn't buckle during a global pandemic, for example. Calling that useless is...I dunno. Quite something.

It's a matter of if they're the only ones capable of doing that, or if they're holding their spot and subtracting resources from fairer players.. Meta is the main instant messaging app, can offer it for free thanks to stealing data, doing dodgy things and dark patterns etc.etc. Aren't they holding a spot that could instead be occupied by someone else? Who can't compete because it has a conscience? If we accept players like meta, then we have to stay in a society where in order for someone to compete with them, they have to be worse, and so the whole society is worse off because there is meta abusively occupying the main spot. There is nothing special that meta can do that others can't, or haven't but other players have been pushed out of market, due to less access to funds

I am italian no? we have some high tax evasion, people say that in order to compete they can't pay all the taxes, but no one says that they MUST be in business, by staying in business, they hold a spot, and the rest of companies in order to compete have to evade taxes too, we can't settle on companies that are bad for the society, because they hold back companies that can add value and offering the same stuff with better ethics

As I say, ethics claims are tricky here. You may just be reading bad things about current companies from news orgs that get clicks from such stories, and who will never contextualise their moralising into a broader picture. It could be anything.

What I'm responding to is this:

> Meta is useless for society

Which I think I have falsified. You've now changed your position to "Meta is better than a company I can imagine, but Meta doesn't allow to exist", which I think is more accurate.

What I said is that if we don't annihilate companies that are consistently doing unethical things (hiding studies about the effect of socials on teens, stealing data, selling data, etc. Can we agree these are unethical? Or we need a committee to decide? Is there anything that is definitely unethical, or Meta is getting fined because judges are drunk?)

So yeah let's say judges are not day drinkers and they are continuously fining meta for reasons, is it being once per month fined? Is it consistently unethical?

So it keeps a power spot, it retains users thanks to dark patterns, and unethical algorithms, it holds a dominant position, what I think is that a better company CAN or CANNOT exist, but if Meta is allowed to keep being unethical and holding a dominant position then we would never know

What I say is that we should not annihilate companies who make mistakes.

We should annihilate companies that are consistently unethical (Or day drinking judges, I guess at this point)

And without any cult of holding morality, I don't hold it, I don't want , I don't want to be a dictator, but there are laws, and according to courts Meta is breaking those laws over and over, I am not a messiah, but at a certain point we have to trust the entities whose jobs is to know the law when they say Meta is doing unethical stuff and so are fining it

This was my original post:

> That doesn't mean it should always be applied. We shouldn't be attempting to annihilate companies. Just make sure the fine outweighs the benefit of doing something - just as we would with most fines.

You seem to be agreeing, but given the length of your prose it's hard to tell. Do you disagree?

I agree in general, disagree in the specificity, so not for meta, not for those companies who are found consistently guilty of something

Norway isn’t in the EU.

Yeah, I mean, it is part of EEA, pays for the access to common market, respects the EU directives, but has no saying, but that doesn't like make big difference

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