It is a long time coming and still a long way to go and the surveillance big tech giants should pay a high price for abusing and violating the privacy of hundreds of millions of users.
It's a shame that this fine is too generous to Google and it won't scare them. It should be much larger than that and should be in the multi-billions of dollars.
Losing 5% of Google's annual profits will absolutely scare the shit out of them.
Consider how much this harms their ability to keep reinvesting the profits into growing the business. A 5% loss is likely sufficient to get them to stop for a moment and rethink their strategy so the punishment won't recur.
> No. Why do you think that is?
Because you lament the lack of a multi-billion dollar fine when the title states that it's a $4B fine. This comes off as nonsensical and disconnected from reality, in a way that triggered "¯\_(ツ)_/¯, maybe it's GPT3".
With that said, I meant it as a joke, not a serious accusation. The likely explanation here is this comes down to the common case of human confusion.
As a tangential aside:
I can only conclude that due to the curse of knowledge, we collectively are overly paranoid about bot commenters on HN. I was just accused of being a bot just two or three days ago.
> Losing 5% of Google's annual profits will absolutely scare the shit out of them.
No it won't. We all know that this won't be the last of such violations from these big tech companies like Google which the EU is disputing and especially when Facebook paid a similar fine to the FTC years ago and is once again still violating the privacy of its users. So it is clear that they still wouldn't change even if the fine is as high as that.
The fact is, they are not scared of these fines. Setting them in the multi-billion dollars should be the standard and the minimum and continuous violations warrant a much higher significant fine than this generous discounted fine which Google knows it can easily afford to do it again.
For them, the violations is worth it and pays more than these so-called generous 'fines'.
> Because you lament the lack of a multi-billion dollar fine when the title states that it's a $4B fine. This comes off as nonsensical and disconnected from reality, in a way that triggered "¯\_(ツ)_/¯, maybe it's GPT3".
Except I already said that 'this' fine "needs to be much larger" and disagreed with the EU's 'generous' fine. I'm talking fines of over $10B dollars, which that still qualifies as 'multi-billions of dollars' and 'much larger' than the EU's small fine. I made myself perfectly clear on my whole point.
If the amount of the fine would deal a fatal or nearly fatal blow to the company, they'll simply exit the market and not pay. It's a balancing act.
I'm grateful for the EU setting a good example in this case: a fine which the perp feels is painful, without killing them. This is one proven path to rehabilitation.
It's a shame that this fine is too generous to Google and it won't scare them. It should be much larger than that and should be in the multi-billions of dollars.