Imagine regular laws worked that way, where a prior conviction is only relevant if it was for the exact same crime, and you can go around committing dozens of crimes and be treated like a first offender every time because this time you chose robbery and last time it was theft.

The fines do scale with noncompliance, if Google were to continue to offend they would get a daily fine that is retroactively applied to the full duration.

Because the goal isn’t to punish, it’s to get them to do what the law wants them to do. The fine is supposed to be a slap on the wrist - the actual desired behaviour is compliance

Except they did comply for all the cases where they were fined. They're not fined for one-off behaviors, but for how their services are structured. That's GPs point.

You appear to be arguing with the assumption that "get the operators to comply" is false.

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?)

It‘s nice to have such revenue to fund EU programs on digital sovereignty. European institutions give plenty of money to startups. You need an entry to the program, but when you are in, it can account for 50-70% or more in your early stage funding. And that‘s nice, because you keep more equity.

It's a tariff on noncompliance, designed to make it cheaper to comply than to not comply.

> I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim.

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.

> I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim.

This isn't a class action.

That would be something like 70% of their yearly global profit AFAIK.

The same principle evoked in the rest of this thread, if the penalties match exactly or are under the profits you can generate by injuring (in the legal sense) EU citizens it's not really a penalty but rather a cost of business. Plus markets are very interconnected, especially the digital ones.

EU competition law is not framed around valuing Europeans more than others, it is framed around protecting competition and market functioning inside the EU.

No need to moralize it and pretend anyone is using this "value" European humans more than other humans.

Because they decided that way. Any other country in the world can decide the same thing but they don't have the same leverage as the EU. Google makes a lot of money in the EU.

Why a year, when they've often been breaking the rules for much longer than that?

Why not 20% (30%), given that's the share of world GDP (PPP) due to the EU?

Why revenue rather than profit?

The answer is: big round number that's roughly justifiable as a big stick for, and I want to emphasise this, a punishment to make sure they don't break the rules.

The damages done that caused the fine are usually spread over multiple years.

India is doing 10% as well.

The reasoning is very simple just "carry a big stick", multinational companies need to fear the fines to want compliance.

I lived in a city where police can fine you for biking in the night without the lights on, but police catches people so rarely that, per ride, the mathematical expectation of a fine was lower than the cost of batteries.

Until the tragedy of the commons kicks in.

Of course they shouldn't get a pass.

My point is, we can't expect them to behave. And if they promise to, that promise isn't worth much.