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jacooper | 5 months ago

Lol 5 million is pocket change for meta, wtf are these courts doing?

discuss

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maccard|5 months ago

The goal isn’t to penalize, it’s to get them to comply.

throwaw12|5 months ago

for 5 million?

I am willing to pay 0.01$ out of my pocket to not comply with some regulations in my country. I can even pay annually

jeroenhd|5 months ago

This is 5 million for this particular court case. Nothing is preventing others from filing their own, very similar cases. If Meta ignores the court's decision, a second lawsuit may end much worse for them.

Though, practically speaking, America has been threatening to make the trade war they started much worse for the EU if it tried to enforce things like DSA and GDPR fines. We'll have to see how enforceable these laws really are.

gman83|5 months ago

The US wouldn't be doing this if these American tech companies weren't lobbying the government hard to kill the DSA & GDPR. It seems like all regulatory enforcement is out of the window with this administration, so if they can kill the European regulations, they're free to do as they like. The scoping of the trade war as the US having a deficit with all countries by not counting services is ridiculous, it's the most important sector of the economy, and the US has a massive surplus in services.

RobotToaster|5 months ago

It also means that after 50 days there's basically no incentive to comply.

tantalor|5 months ago

Maybe it's per user?

markus92|5 months ago

Na, but under the Dutch legal you can go back to the court if they pay the 5 million without changing anything and ask if they can increase it cus it clearly wasn’t enough. They’ll just keep tacking zeroes on.

diggan|5 months ago

Doesn't seem like it:

> 5.3. orders Meta Ireland to pay BoE a penalty of €100,000.00 for each day or part thereof that it does not, or does not fully, comply with the orders under 5.1 and/or 5.2, up to a maximum total of €5,000,000.00.

Original:

> 5.3. veroordeelt Meta Ierland om aan BoE een dangsom te betalen van € 100.000.00 oor iedere dag of gedeelte daarvan dat zij niet of niet volledig aan de beelen onder 5.1 en/of 5.2 oldoet. tot een maximum an in totaal € 5.000.000.00 is bereikt.

It seems like usually they start with smaller fines, and if the offense is repeated, they ramp it up. Kind of makes sense.

hsuduebc2|5 months ago

I believe that is kind of a warning. The major fines based on the global revenue is issued usually by some european institution.

__MatrixMan__|5 months ago

Fines in general aren't effective.

Perhaps this case doesn't warrant it, but generally speaking I'd like to see allocating jailtime across the top shareholders as an option.

If my dog bites somebody, I'm on the hook, it should be no different with a company.

Aurornis|5 months ago

> but generally speaking I'd like to see allocating jailtime across the top shareholders as an option.

Shareholders don’t control day to day operations of a company. Top shareholders rarely have enough shares by themselves to control anything about the company. Remember the VW emissions cheating scandal where people were jailed? It would be completely unreasonable to jail top shareholders because some manager somewhere concocted a scheme to cheat on emissions.

Jailing top shareholders for decisions made by the company would be a weird misdirected use of the justice system. If someone is to be jailed, it should be people responsible for the decision.

That said, I can’t believe anyone would be watching the news about the current U.S. administration threatening companies with spurious and often nonsensical demands and think that we should be normalizing the process of letting the government jail individuals if the company does something the government doesn’t like that would have previously been a small fine. You can’t think of any way this power might be abused by elected officials?

DoktorDelta|5 months ago

"I'll Believe That Corporations Are People When Texas Executes One"

~Robert Reich

lucianbr|5 months ago

There was a thread recently about sanctions, and how if you break that, executives can actually go to jail.

It is obviously known how to get corporations to comply, and the mechanism is used when governments really want to. In this case and others like it, probably they don't care enough.