Comment by rafaelmn
2 days ago
I went to the site and sorted by fine - I needed to go to the bottom of second list to find a non US company ? By the time I get to pages that are mostly non US companies the fines are two orders of magnitude smaller and dropping fast - do you have any aggregate view to compare ? I would not be surprised at all that indeed most of the fines were towards US companies in total amount.
I saw TikTok at #3 and #5, Enel (Italian) at #15, Vodafone at #19 (British) and starting at around #21 the list is basically dominated by European companies.
Speaking from personal experience, American companies, especially the big ones, tend to treat everyone else as "Americans that they don't know they're American yet" or alternatively "slightly dumb Americans".
At least for one of them, yeah, they apply the legal laws, but the general decisions are taken in the US with little regard for local "non-impeding laws", I would call them. "Impeding laws" would be laws that would block the launch of something (for example they wouldn't attach an AR-15 to every product sold). "Non-impeding laws" would for example be, labor laws. They just assume that what works in the US sort of works everywhere else and deal with the consequences along the way.
I count TikTok as big tech non-EU so I automatically put it in to that bucket but you are right it is not a US company. Still fits the theme that EU is using GDPR to shake down big tech it does not own. I missed Enel (did not know about them) and yeah Vodafone was bottom page 2 first EU brand I recognized from the list, but OK middle of page 2 for non-EU.
Again just a rough feeling from the list but I would speculate that over 50 percent of fines in total were towards US or non-EU based companies.
Please re-read what you’ve written in these two comments with a critical eye. You’re speaking from a lack of knowledge without very much care and reaching incorrect conclusions that agree with your initial bias. When someone else does the work of helping nudge you towards reality you seem to be doing a poor job correcting. Sorry if this comes across as rude, it’s said with the kindest of intentions.
5 replies →
> big tech it does not own
If a company does business in the EU, it's dealing with EU citizens, giving the EU jurisdiction over how that business is conducted.
The EU absolutely has full legal standing for this; if big tech doesn't want to abide by it, they can always leave the EU.
American companies get fined more often for the simple reason that they break the GDPR more often since the US lacks the same legal privacy framework, which means they don't have the same incentive to comply with it and instead try to rules lawyer around it.
> Still fits the theme that EU is using GDPR to shake down big tech it does not own.
It's not a shake down, it's the fucking law which they don't follow and have to pay fines accordingly. Every single business in the EU has to follow these laws, if the US-based ones are not taking proper measures to not act illegally that's on them, not on the legislation, this shake down narrative is quite tired by now.
> Again just a rough feeling from the list but I would speculate that over 50 percent of fines in total were towards US or non-EU based companies.
Perhaps because the US companies are more eager in breaking laws and figuring it out later? Isn't that the whole take on EU vs US business approach, the US ones are big risk takers (including in acting illegally) vs EU ones being risk-averse?
I feel disheartened that this narrative is still spewed on HN, it's just vitriol, the US companies are breaking the law of EU members, if they do business here they need to follow the law, it's absurdly simple.
6 replies →
"Still fits the theme that EU is using GDPR to shake down big tech it does not own."
No, the EU is trying to protect the rights of its citizens.
If they wanted to "shake down big tech" they'd just do a Turkey or India and pressure them to do their bidding in terms of censorship and information exchange.
2 replies →
Its because American companies are much larger than most European companies in terms of revenue. And because the impact of their infringements are much larger due to the nature of their business. If Bumfuck LLC from Sweden with maybe a 1000 customers fucks up they arent impacting millions of users, unlike when Google or Meta does things.
IME as an American, US companies play much more fast and loose with laws. Especially tech, which has "disrupt first, ask questions later" approach to ethics.