This is not true. A billion hurts - it’s many people’s bonuses, etc. Amazon is all about margins, they’re fighting teeth and nails for
saving money wherever they can. Their efficiency comes from the fact that everything matters to them, and a billion absolutely does matter.
Amazon regularly makes over $90B a quarter now[0][1]. ~1% or lower is not much, especially considering that this abuse of market domination secured them more revenue than it lost.
Hard to quantify (well the authorities gave it a shot) how much the abuse garnered them, but governments tend to under-penalize rather than over-penalize corporations.
I was very careful to avoid writing income for that very reason, I did not say that it was their income -- I said they "made" that much, which they did, they made that much revenue. It's in the link itself as well. 1% of quarterly revenue is still not a lot to pay.
Income can also be a misleading indicator to watch -- if you're going to make a royalty deal for example you'd better do it on revenue, not income.
Apologies I did it again there -- 1% of a single quarter's revenues is not a lot to pay. I mistakenly typed income when I meant to type revenue there like I meant previously.
Until fines recur like revenue does it's a drop in the bucket.
Fines will recur - for one, EU is 27 separate countries, each of them can impose their own fines. Also, Italy itself can impose additional fines if Amazon does not change its behavior and fines for second time offenders can be multiple of the first one.
This fine might not be that much in itself, but it sets the precedent, which makes fines in other countries more likely.
So I meant a percentage/time-based recurring fine -- as in x% of revenue for y quarters kind of fine.
I do agree with you though, just like the australian news outlets fining FB+Google thing, governments are figuring out that international mega corps are also a good source of income by way of fines.
I fear that even this is also short sighted -- even when imposed by static fines like this, the 1.3B number looks huge, but what we can't see is whether it was actually economical for Amazon to do this (I think it was), and the thing is the companies that were destroyed as a result are much harder to re-create in an environment where Amazon still has the overwhelming amount of marketshare/monopoly power. Eventually, if this continues and Amazon decides to hit back, the lack of natural competition (due to fines that came too little too late in regards to anti-competitive behavior) may put the nation state(s) between a rock and a hard place.
