> 2% of revenue is a huge fine for any profitable business.

Not necessarily. In a business like ours (online training) where any additional new customers basically flow through to the bottom line, if I got 20% of my revenue from the EU, and I had to pay a 2% fine now and then, it wouldn't be terrible.

I can see how some slimy businesses would say, "I'm not even going to bother complying - I'll just keep taking revenue off the table and paying the small fees."

Sure, if your profit margins were 50% on EU revenues, it wouldn’t be a big deal to pay 2% of the max fine. Or if your startup doesn’t have revenues, you could get off scot free.

But most profitable businesses are going to have profit margins in the 10-20% range, and that fine is considerable. And if the EU applies it to the last 5 years revenues, they could wipe out a years profit.

For example, Apple probably has close to $100B in annual EU revenue, $2B is a huge incentive to invest in doing this right. But if your EU business is $1M, $20,000 is probably a fraction of your cost of implementation.

The law would have been far better if it specifically limited fine levels by size of company. IE < 1M in sales, 1M to 10M, 10M-100M, 100M-1B, 1B+.

It’s on worldwide revenues, not EU revenues

Ouch, that's amazingly short-sighted.