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Comment by zgs | Hacker News Reader

$30 million per annum wouldn't even represent a bump against their revenue. Until the fines are revenue based, it's not going to matter.

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Of course they care about $30 million per year. That's enough to fund a good-sized full-time team just to work on this one single problem.

You can't go idly throwing away $30 million a year, even if you're Facebook. Yes, they can get away with it once or twice, but if that is your approach to unnecessary $30 million costs, you're not going to last very long.

It depends - what is the _benefit_ of not doing anything? Probably more than +30 mil, otherwise they would be doing something.

The benefit is that you still profit from actions that break the law.

If it's possible to stop breaking the law in a way that the revenue drop is smaller than $30M a year, they'll possibly do it at some point. However, it's possible that the drop would be bigger, in which case the $30M/y fine is just cost of doing business.

Quite amazing how legal and accounting teams do this kind of math, really.

I mean eventually the consequences could escalate if they are found to not be effective.

And that’s probably the point they’ll do something, but not before

If you find a $100 bill on the street, do you pick it up, or do you just assume it can't be real because surely someone else would have picked it up already if it was real?

There's a staggering amount of inefficiencies in large corporations. Just because a corpo is doing something a certain way right now, doesn't mean it's necessarily the result of a higly optimized process or rational risk/benefit analysis.

Norway is only 5 million people - if every country in the world did it the fine would be more like $30 billion per annum, which is about a quarter of Facebook's revenue.

Still, agreed would be better if it was a more punitive fine!

Metas profit for 2022 was 23 billion. Assuming 3 billion users that’s like $8 per user per year of profit. Thats actually quite insane how much value they extract out of each of us.

I'd also guess that profitability is not spread evenly across all users, and certainly not across all countries.

I'd guess a good chunk of us are worth £0 (or even negative) and then there is a long tail of increasing valuable users who interact with adverts and services.

Amazing how valuable some of the users must be!

Absolutely. The fact that a single ad click for personal injury lawyers could fetch Google hundreds if not thousands of dollars is testamount to this.

I actually think they care about $30M, especially as this just might start a slew of copycats, or similar suits in Norway.

It is better for them to do something big enough to hurt, but not big enough to get all of Meta's guns blazing. This will accepted, and we can start from there with the next step (applying this same ruling to a hundred other users, or in a hundred other courts)

A million here, a million there, and before you know it you are talking about real money - Everett Dirksen

Small steps. Norway population (5.5 million) is equivalent to 0.07% of the total world population. Meta's revenue would be proportional, and so would be the fine. To avoid inconveniencing foreigners, Norwegian advertisers would have to pony up $98,500 every day.

To frame it differently: if all GDPR countries were to fine similarly it'd scale up to $3-4 billion annually and that would start to hurt a little.

META is trying to fight this in the courts (with no success). At some point other countries will see that it is watertight and they'll follow Norways line. In my opinion META can do what Norway tells them to do or end up not being in the EU, either forced out or leaving themselves. I can't see any other outcome.

No, but when multiple bigger European countries and the EU starts fining them things start to add up.

GDPR fines can be straight global revenue (up to 4%) based, so such fines are no joke

I hear this argument every-single-time some fine against bigcorp.

Someone should sum all those fines, maybe then it will have a dent?

Moreover revenue is useless in this context, we should compare with profit anyways. And maybe profit against Norway particulary or any other country in question.

If you make it clear to the court that you’re just willing to treat the fine as a tax and pay it indefinitely without having any intention of altering your behavior, I’m sure they’ll start imposing other penalties after some time

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