Yes, why not? The EU can't revoke the corporate charter for entities that don't have the bulk of their presence in the EU but it can cause them so much grief that they will either abandon the EU or they will mend their ways. Apparently the fines imposed so far aren't nearly large enough.
Let’s make the biggest social networks Meta, TikTok, etc incur fines in the tens of billions for every investigation of significant privacy violations (like Meta’s existing case) of its users and pay back their users in compensation over that until the company either changes or exits the market the regulators reside in. This is far better than a ban and the regulators and users get free cash out of it.
Given that we have the regular ‘all social networks do this’ excuses on collecting data, the standard for large social networks in the 1B+ daily active users collecting user data should have much larger fines in the billions.
Regulators destroying markets isn't the slam dunk you might believe it is. Why not fine GSK out of existence any time someone dies from a mislabelled allergen? Even though that is far worse than data being processed in the wrong country (not even being mishandled, just the increasing chance of mishandling) it wouldn't be proportionate.
> Why not fine GSK out of existence any time someone dies from a mislabelled allergen?
Funny, this is essentially what happens with tobacco taxes. Cigarettes are prohibitively expensive and thus have caused that industry to falter in the US.
That's definitely not the same. Taxes aren't fines. Taxes may be market-destroying, if there's enough political will to make it happen, as with cigarettes, but they aren't capricious.
Technically, you're correct they aren't, but how realistically are they are any different? In both cases the government profits from a corporation's behavior.
I think they are to some extent, or these giant ones are. They look a lot more like "take advantage of local sentiment" or "make an example of this one" than taxes, which are applied uniformly.
And also because that action has consequences on the world stage. Deliberately harming one of your ally's largest businesses isn't something I expect will be tolerated indefinitely since it's a diet sanction.
You have the victim/perp relationship mixed up I think. Facebook does harm. They are the perp. The EU data subjects are the victims and the 'world stage' is exactly why this sort of transnational company should adapt to local legislation.
The idea that it 'wouldn't be tolerated' suggests - correct me if I read this wrong - that the country where the company originated would then do some kind of tit-for-tat with companies from the other country. But: where were those comments when VAG and other car manufacturers broke the law in the US? (and probably elsewhere too?). My position hasn't changed, they deserved their comeuppance as much as FB does right now.
It's all about framing. If the US agrees that this is bad actors getting rightfully punished for violating local laws then it's all good. If the US looks at the regulation and decides that it's a very complicated ceremony to extract money from US tech companies then it becomes more complicated. And since FB isn't violating US law and the US passed the cloud act I think that this is relatively likely. This court case is effectively a proxy war over the cloud act because meta didn't actually do anything wrong, their actions became wrong in response to us law.
Yes it does, the reason Meta's actions went from legal to illegal is because US law changed.
Facebook has worked the same way for more than a decade. First EU law changed and it was fine because the US and EU had a data sharing agreement, then US law changed. If you what Meta did wrong is not completely rearchitect Facebook in response to a US/EU squabble then your bar for right and wrong is really really low.
There's a lot of things you can point to that Meta does
that are shady, but they thing they actually got fined for didn't have to do with any of them.
