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Define "massive." Because if it doesn't substantially cut into their profits then it's not a fine but just the cost of doing business.
"In case a gatekeeper does not comply with the obligations laid out in the DMA, the Commission can impose fines up to 10% of the company's total worldwide turnover, which can go up to 20% in case of repeated infringement."
The way fines should be constructed. As a percentage of something's worth.
Meta's global revenue last year was $134 billion. It would have to be a historic fine to even make a dent. I'm not hopeful. This will be another "cost of doing business" situation.
A $13 billion fine does not look like a "cost of doing business" scenario to me.
Imagine you making $100K last year doing some shady business. You got caught and convicted in federal court, your punishment is $10K fine, and that's it. You're free to change your tactics and make sure you don't get caught next time.
It's a little bit stink, but it's the best you could asked for.
13 billions to Meta may not be a slap on the wrist, but more like 5 spanks and 15 minutes timeout.
Imagine your "shady stuff" is not putting money into the parking meter because you are lazy. You get hit with a 10k fine. You then fix that and start putting money into the parking meter. Because ultimately it cost you less to fix it, than pay the fine. That's the language corporations understand.
They haven't gotten that fine yet and $13 billion out of $134 billion is absolutely a "cost of doing business" fine. If they still make massive profits at the end of the year, they haven't been hurt.
Corporations have to be punished and they rarely are.
No, a million is cost of doing business. Once you get into single digit percentage fines, you're hurting them. Or do you expect shareholders to say, "ah, that's fine, that's just the EU, we're gonna hold Meta stock because we like them"?
Another thing to consider is that it's also about how many of those fines can the company absorb. Fine them a million? They can take a thousand of those before it even starts making a dent. But how many of the 1% fines can they take? 5? 10? 20?
Why not make the fine 100%?
Why would you want that? Do you seriously want to bankrupt a company for a single mistake? Not sure that's the world I want to live in. Once this cat's out of the bag, it's hard to put back.
I agree, they haven’t got that fine, never mind actually paid it. But it would be about a third of their profits, not exactly negligible, and it could double for repeated offences.
Oh you'll see. It'll be super massive. It'll be amazingly punishing!
It'll be like... 0.2% of their gross.
Then it'll spend years in legal battles to become 0.05%.
Have you seen the kind of fines the EU hands out? They're nothing to sneeze at
Let's hope they get fined and it sets a precedent. That crap of" pay or consent" it's becoming the norm in every site I visit. That's not a free choice. I'm forced to consent if I don't want to pay, so it should be a flawed consent.
European law generally isn't precedent-based, but the commission already put out a statement saying that "pay-or-okay" models are not GDPR compliant. https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-04/edpb_opinion_202408_consentorpay_en.pdf
I disagree, no one is by law obligated to provide free services for you. Either pay or have ads is fine by me.
And DMA does not care about your local newspaper site, unless they're so big that they're a gatekeeper. Ruling based on DMA does not affect anyone but the gatekeepers.
Pay or have ads is fine by the EU’s DMA law too. What isn’t fine is the collection of user data without consent. Facebook can show all the ads they want, but if they collect user data to target those ads they need consent.
Think about radio or TV advertising - those aren’t targeted at specific people, but rather they’re targeted based on what channel, time of day and TV shows that they’re around. Meta can do the same stuff, but they just don’t want to give up that lucrative user data.
I obviously meant ads that track you, didn't know I have to spell it out. So to clarify, I was talking about the tracking kind of ads which need user consent. My point was that giving consent or paying is fine in my book, because you have a choice and no one is entitled to a free service. And that even if DMA decides it's not, it doesn't concern anyone but a few select companies.
To be fair, I'm like 80% sure it was perfectly clear in the original comment as well.
I was making the point that ad-supported services have been financially viable for centuries without needing to invade personal privacy, and that governments have been regulating industries for even longer - and at this point, your personal choice doesn’t really matter. You might be perfectly happy to eat food cooked in an unhygienic kitchen, for example, but enough people have been harmed in the past for food hygiene regulations to be commonplace worldwide.
It's not about having free services but flawed consent. I can't give you my consent if it's either pay or accept tracking tracking. That's not a free consent, and that's what's being ruled here. Give me a paywall, I'm fine with it. But don't you go saying you're giving me a free choice when it's either pay or screw your privacy. That's not consent, that's extortion.
That's a choice, my choice is to back away or use an anonymous window and accept the tracking if I really want to see the content.
It's just another paywall, it just gives you the option of paying with your data. It's your choice what's more valuable.
But I get it, people want choices shoved down their throats, they don't want to actually choose. That's why paywall is fine, but paywall with free-with-tracking-option is the big bad. No one forces you to give your consent, give it or don't, it's up to you.
You don't want the choice to consent, you want to be angry at someone about something.
You don't get it. The problem is that the consent is not free. I can't give my consent to be tracked if the alternative is to pay a fee. It's as simple as that. The consent must be given without flaws, I can't be forced to accept the tracking, because then it's not a consent. You should stop shilling for corpos.
You're not forced. And I'm not shilling anyone, for all I care Meta can collapse, I don't use any of their products because of their tracking. See, I made my choice, you want to push your choice onto others, big difference.
They COULD do a lot of things. Show me an article if something actually happens.