>Those are a joke. Considering what's going on, those values should be orders of magnitude higher.

Frankly, I think higher fines and more aggressive fining would even further deepen the business moat that mega businesses are already developing over small and medium.

The article already describes how the current regulatory regime boosted Google and big players 20-40% directly at the cost of small and medium (not in the top 100 or top 50) sites.

Frankly, I think European countries should just take the China approach and ban American companies because there isn't going to be a regulatory structure that works here, and they're only going to hurt their domestic competition by playing this stupid game.

China doesn’t ban American companies for that reason, they ban them because political dissidents could use them to communicate privately (gmail) or publicly (YouTube Facebook twitter....). Not all American companies are banned, either.

but it works out that way - india is following a similar strategy now and some south east asian countries are following suit

India won’t block Facebook. Or YouTube or even twitter. They would have huge riots on their hands if they did.

India blocked facebook internet, India is blocking FDI(Foreign direct investments) ie Walmart can't come in and put everyone out of business etc.

The business moat is irrelevant. It should be handled with anti trust regulations and not at the expanse of pro privacy.

I'm sorry but anti-trust for foreign companies is kind of a joke. The French government et al literally cannot "break up" Google or Facebook et al, all they can do is ban Google from their territory.

Also, deep and hearty guffaw from me regarding "the business moat is irrelevant". Thinking like that is why American companies dominate European tech and not vice versa, just saying. Thinking like that is why domestic competition just took a 40% hit in Europe as the business went to largely American firms. 40%!

> Frankly, I think higher fines and more aggressive fining would even further deepen the business moat that mega businesses are already developing over small and medium.

You can always charge small companies more than the big ones. Also: witness my world's tiniest violin.

And yes, if that doesn't help, absofuckinglutely block them.

This is not a joke, because the European Agencies believe in teaching and learning more than in punishing. What they want is compliance, not making money.

They will give you warning and time to fix it more than fine you. A fine is solution of last resort, after you burned them and proved you can not be reformed.

Especially in the light of:

"89,271 data breach notifications"

Very odd.

Exactly, apparently the average amount fines is fairly low. The maximum fine is 4% of revenue or 20 million euros (whichever is bigger). 4% of Google's 2018 revenue would be almost 5 billion euros (with a B). Google could have had it much worse.

most of the companies being fined are EU businesses / shops. europe doesn't have many big successful tech companies.

Sounds like Google is being unfairly targeted due to its success & cash reserves.

Nothing to do with their size and number of users impacted then?