The goal of the regulation is to get the operators to comply, which they usually do after fines (EDIT: and litigations and whining, of course), because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
The goal should be to incentivise them to comply with the law as a whole, not to keep deliberately breaking different sections of the law to make profit above the level of fines
That's why people want the level of the fines to go up, to disincentivise the more broad lawbreaking
You don't get a higher fine every time you go very the speed limit or park in the wrong place.
You don't get a higher fine if you don't have a bus ticket.
This is not a felony. Perhaps it should be, but it's not.
The correct solution to this is to have fines scaled to the value of a company and an exponential doubling of fines for every re-offence that falls under the same category of crime with a cooling off period after a few years.
The first fine should sting and the second should be damaging to a company and the third should be crippling.
The EU has been fining Google for years to no avail.
Me after a quick research:
2017: €2.42 billion fine for favoring its own comparison shopping service.
Results: huge changes to Google's shopping service.
2018: €4 billion fine over Android-related practices.
Results: Google Play separately from Google Search and Chrome, and manufacturers gained more flexibility over preinstalled apps.
What we need to see is that exponential function. Everyone here should have at least the intuition from Moore's Law and COVID that exponential growth is either your best friend or your worst enemy depending on if it's working for you.
The next fine should've been 8B, and the one after that 16... The regression back down to 1B is counter productive to the goal of inducing compliance and reducing the offender's ability to continue to offend by taking away their resources to do so.
The big corporations don't really fix their evil behaviour. That's why fines keep on re-emerging.
> because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
See above. If the fines were to work, it would not become a repeating issue.
I think mandatory jailtimes are the only solution. When the CEOs are suddenly for 10 years in a small room, slowly they will begin to stop their mafia-strategy.
I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim. If the fines are moderate and big co keeps paying that's steady revenue for the EU institutions.
It is almost entirely unsurprising that the EU tech industry is such a disaster area when people say things like this as if they are a good thing.
As is the “letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy"” when this wasn’t said or even implied anywhere.
It is amazing how HN has descended into arguing against people making points by saying they are someone else and saying something completely different.
The point of the EU subsidies is, surely, not to enrich a few people with the right connections but to stimulate a productive ecosystem that supports well paid skilled employment, right? Right?
Honestly, I don’t know what are you talking about. Tech industry in Europe is far from being dead. Not least because for many American companies Europe as market is dead.
I worked for a unicorn once and it came with the maxxed-out Mac book and the most meaningless job ever in the industry that should not exist.
I also wrote endless FP7 and ESA proposals for a living, and that was an utter waste of everyone's brainpower and public money.
I am now working in public sector IT, and while the job can seem dull to the outsiders, I at least serve the citizens.
After a fire erupted in my block, I could proudly say to my neighbors after the fact that there were bits of my code here and there that connected the first alert with the firefighters station.
How long have you been working inside the behemoth? Can you tell us more about the inner workings, where the money goes, how much, etc?
These companies do, in fact, change behaviour in response to such actions; they may hire lawyers to find and exploit as many loopholes as they can, but they do ultimately comply. Even X ultimately complied in response to Brazil, and the EU is a much more important market for Google than Brazil ever was for X.
(Why would you expect to get dollars from an EU settlement?)
This isn't a class action.
There's this standard assumption that HN users are well educated.
Budgets don't work like that. It's not like the US federal government collects taxes and then deposits bags of gold coins on people's doorsteps.
Taxes, fines, etc are all collected and then they mostly go to a general, undifferentiated budget which is then divided by the various ministries (departments, whatever).
So yes, if you're a EU citizen you did get the money back. As roads, hospitals, research funding, etc.