Oh man that sounds juicy 🤤
Only change I’d argue for is to go off market cap instead of annual worldwide revenue though because you can say some insanely small amount on paper like 4%, but then that same 4% turns from ~$5B USD with annual revenue to ~$33B USD with market cap. But because we’d also want to actually deter businesses from breaking it and considering it a cost of business, I would think something like a fine of 110% of market cap value would be a huge deterrence.
Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It helps a lot that that’s revenue and not profit, so it ignores other expenses. Of course, I don’t know how much that matters, but it is still enough to hurt.
SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de 9 months ago
I’d say that’s a huge problem actually.
For a normal company, abusing data is a small part of their business and profit is a few percent of revenue, so such a fine would be devastating.
For some tech companies, profit is in the double digit percent of revenue and half of it comes from breaking the law, so the 4% are a tax they can happily pay and still be more profitable than if they followed the law.
elvith@feddit.de 9 months ago
Depends. It’s up to 4% of the yearly revenue per court ruling. And not necessarily once per year. If you were to continue to ignore these rulings and continue abusing the data, that can rack up fast. Pay once - that may or may not be a problem. Pay monthly - there goes up to 48% of your yearly revenue.
SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de 9 months ago
It’d be great if that was how it works, unfortunately it seems like the penalties are closer to once every 3-5 years than monthly, skewing the balance even further to “screw the law, just pay the fee”:(