Comment by brookst
7 days ago
Probably best indexed to profit rather than revenue. 10% of revenue would be a one quarter’s profit for meta, but more than a year’s profit for Amazon and about 9 years of profit for Otto. Higher margins / profits should mean higher fines.
The laws specify revenue, to avoid transfer pricing removing all fineable profits. Live by the sword, die by the sword I guess.
This isn’t live/die/sword. This is “low margin companies held to a higher standard than high margins companies”. It hurts Otto a lot more to lose 9 years of profit than it hurts Amazon to lose one quarter.
If there hadn't been such transfer pricing shenanigans, then the laws would have been written on profit. Because there's little to no profit shown in many entities in the EU, the laws were written on revenue.
More generally, the whole point of getting absurdly large (and such to be covered by DMA etc) is precisely to extract more monopoly profits.
GDPR is different, in that one can easily imagine a low margin company getting hurt by this, but in that case they should invest in compliance, rather like these (mostly US) companies do for US laws.
Profit doesn't include employee and especially executive compensation, i.e. what the perpetrators were paid.
Sure. But it’s what shareholders care about. Who are you trying to punish financially if not the shareholders?