Comment by dinkblam
3 days ago
no year goes by without Italy imposing random >100m€ fines for 2-3 american tech companies. whenever they need money, they just hit another one without care whether actual laws were violated. the amount they take has no correlation to what has been blamed, only to how much the companies can afford to pay without threatening to leave the country.
the 'Guardia di Finanza' has a long standing tradition of trying to extort money without regards to actual laws. its not long ago that they told all companies 'if you pay X% more than your tax report says you own then we won't destroy your company'. more recently they went after the Agnelli family trying to extort money without having an actual case.
its not the rule of law, its simply Might makes Right or modern robber knights...
> no year goes by without Italy imposing random >100m€ fines for 2-3 american tech companies. whenever they need money
Since you apparently know, how large would a 100M EUR injection into the Italian budget for 2026 actually be, relatively to the other things?
You're saying they're doing this because they need money, but wouldn't changing the tax rates be more effective at this? 100M feels like a piss in the ocean, when you talk about a country's budget, but since you seem to imply Italy is doing this survive, would be nice to know what ratio this fine represents of their budget, which I'm guessing you have in front of you already?
Italy's unconsolidated budget for 2025 is projected to be around 700 billion euros in revenue and 900 billion in expenditures:
https://www.rgs.mef.gov.it/VERSIONE-I/attivita_istituzionali...
So yeah, whoever talks about these fines as a strategy for fixing the budget knows nothing about the actual budget of a G7 state, these fines are completely immaterial to Italian fiscal policy.
For perspective, that's roughly equivalent to someone with a €50,000 annual income finding €7 on the street and someone claiming they're doing it "to survive."
From a post I saw on reddit:
> In 2024 EU fined US tech companies €3.8B meanwhile public internet tech companies paid only €3.2B in income tax
How is it not a major budget contribution to have fines on American companies bigger than revenue from your entire tech industry?
That is a de facto tax, particularly when they announce these new fines monthly like clockwork.
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Completely agree with this analysis.
Especially on the GDF aspect which is definitely true and impacting both SMBs and big Corps.
When the majority of the GDP is generated by public expenditures, you need to extort money. Which is pretty bad but that’s standard practice.
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This comment isn’t helpful and adds nothing to the conversation.
When someone makes an argument regarding ‘x’, the correct response is a rebuttal to the argument on its merits. Not “why are you defending x?”
Because if Apple can't defend itself even with the lawyers they can afford, it means that they really are breaking the law.
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This company has provided immeasurably more for me than Italy has in my lifetime.
It's the EU way. The only area where they produce world-leading innovation is regulatory regimes, so gotta use it to hit up American tech companies like an ATM.
Just an idea - how about not breaking the law?
Oh please. "The law" is a Kafkaesque patchwork that delegates authority to local officials and has enough complexity and wiggle room to make anything possible. We're not talking about a speed limit sign here. Show me the [company], I'll show you the crime.
I've been assured by people in this thread and others that, for example, if you "don't spy on users", you don't need cookie banners, and yet official EU sites have them.
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They can always chose not to sell their products and services in the EU if they don't want to comply with the laws here.
This, I think, is the real answer why this is happening. The motivation behind these huge fines on large U.S. tech companies by EU countries is actually "we need revenue", not "we must protect our users". I would expect this to become another source of strain between the EU and the US as the EU economy continues to atrophy. Especially so if the U.S. economy weakens, too.
European companies are fined all the time as well, you just don't see the news about it, there definitely no ill-intent vs american companies as you are trying to imply