It's a matter of priorities as well. There's hardly funding to prosecute everyone that breaks any sort of law. So you aim for the big fish. Many more are "hurt" by FB's practices than some random other small player. In that sense, FB is committing the larger crime.

Picking the large foreign company is always an easy target, it can easily lead to protectionism: enforce laws on the outsiders but not the insiders. China is an extreme case of this: foreign companies must walk on egg shells while domestic companies are able to easily break laws now and ask for forgiveness later if the party decides to crackdown.

You are suggesting that the EU is picking on the outsiders. However, do you have any proof of that? For example, if you look at fines handed out by the EU, some of the largest ones concern companies from the EU:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/27/the-largest-fines-dished-out...

If you look at EU court decisions concerning privacy, you see that it mostly concerns European companies and government bodies (e.g. people storing their fingerprints being stored for passport applications). Those cases just don't get as much exposure in the US:

https://ec.europa.eu/anti-fraud/sites/antifraud/files/casela...

Another factor here may be that EU companies generally stick more to privacy rules, because it is easier to get sued directly by their citizens. E.g. in Germany many institutions and companies are paranoid when it comes to privacy and go out of their way to avoid lawsuits.

You add in the word "foreign" for no apparent reason. What makes you think the EU is targeting FB for being American? I see no proof of this. Size, sure, but the EU also has many regulations for the internal market. For example, we actually have net neutrality, and there's now regulations to limit roaming charges.

The argument they’ve made is that they are targeting FB and not their competitors. If true, it has many possible abusive implications, one of the common ones being protectionism. It might not be that, but it is a huge red flag that it could be that.

It's easy to level accusations and then back off justifying by saying it's just a possibility.

I did not edit my original comments where I clearly said “leads to”. If you think that meant an accusation, then that’s your right of course, but it isn’t correct to then say I was using similar language to back out of it.

If you are going to accuse you ought probably be able to back up the argument or don't bother to waste other readers time.

They are targeting companies from personal data protection-weak jurisdictions who want EU customers.

To use your example, US has targeted companies from IP-protection-weak countries. Was it directly targeting China? I'd say not necessarily.

If they are targeting all companies in their jurisdiction, I have no problem with that.

The only people suggesting anything else were anti-EU commentators. Just like the £350m a week the UK supposedly sends to the EU.

But is in this case an EU institution selecting FB or a civil rights organization selecting the biggest offender? If the citizens complain about FB and going after justice why are you asking the citizens to find first other smaller and non US company that maybe did much less damage and start with them. Citizens should have the right to demand justice for illegal behavior of US company that makes business in EU without having the other camp calling protectionism.

It is like the Microsoft anti competition case would not take place until we find some small non US OS vendor to punish first so the Americans won't get upset.

If the law is no cookies or no tracking, then they can literally pick a random internet company within their bidders whose offending. In practice, such broad laws can only be selectively enforced.

And how many people are actually going to pay attention to that? Further, how is that not any different than the "selective enforcement" that you claim is happening against FB?

>they can literally pick a random internet company In this case they are the citizens, the citizens would not pcik at random but the company that affects them.