To add to that, fines can and do bankrupt small businesses. I cannot remember the last time a big company went bankrupt by fines. Breaking the law poses existential threat to small businesses, not large enterprises.

Fines should be proportional to income. They're supposed to be a deterrent, not a revenue source.

Companies play a lot of games to minimize income for tax reasons. Allowing them do do the same with fines is unreasonable.

It’s actually fairly difficult to get an objective measurement of a companies size. Go by total sales and industries with high profit margins look much smaller. Go by number of employees and retail looks vastly larger than tech companies etc.

Go by market cap (for public companies). The markets are pretty effective at valuing companies.

/me looks at GameStop

There's tens of thousands of publicly traded companies worldwide, and one company having some weird fluctuations for a period of a few days at a time is a tiny little rounding error. This is the exception that proves the rule. All the other metrics proposed by Retric have worse edge cases than this, which they pointed out.

Market cap has several issues. Most companies are private. The market cap is likely to tank before any major fine. Company size is a proxy for how much stuff their doing so a minor fine for an individual restaurant is wildly overkill applied all of McDonalds revenue.

Finally, it promotes using lots of subsidiaries to firewall risks from fines which adds a lot of pointless overhead to the economy.

I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm saying it's the best we have. What alternative are you suggesting? The problem of private companies applies to every metric you can think of, as none of those metrics are private!

But... they like the stock

I've been saying this for years. It's refreshing to see someone else hold the same opinion.

Having arbitrary amounts that don't scale is both bribery and slavery. A speeding ticket for example that cripples someone with low income for weeks is just the cost of doing business for someone with enough wealth. It's really not that far off from actual bribery.

I agree with this idea and think it should extend to personal fines like speeding tickets, but I can see large companies offshoring illegal work to small contracting companies or shell corporations.

That's how fines work for individuals, in Finland:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

This is why surveillance capitalists tried to rally the Valley against the GDPR: fines based on global income could be effective, which is unacceptable to companies used to treating breaking the law as a minor cost of doing business.

This is such an important point. And sadly it appears that they have been successful. The sentiment on GDPR in SV seems to be overwhelmingly negative, for all the wrong reasons I believe.

What’s funny is that the GDPR is pretty universally well-liked, or at least accepted as a necessary evil in my European tech bubble...

Speaking as an American living in Europe, I love GDPR.

Speaking as an American living in America, I love GDPR.

Where I work [big-co], it is mandated that all of our services are GDPR-compliant, regardless of worldwide location.

The only people who hate GDPR are ad-industry parasites. To that I say: good riddance, and don't let starvation hurt too much on the way down.

Actually the biggest issue I have is all the amateur having misconceptions about gdpr and inventing stupid rules, because of it. For example my daughters kindergarten decided they can't do a class photo anymore because of gdpr. Even as all parents agreed, we had to leave the property to make the photo. Funnily, my older daughter had a school picture taken that is even published in a book and distributed to all parents at the school.

On a committee recently we had a large argument if we could email some professors to nominate their PhD students for a price. We had one person very strongly arguing that we can't "because gdpr". Because of people like that many people think that they personally can't do things anymore that they were used to.

> The only people who hate GDPR are ad-industry parasites. To that I say: good riddance, and don't let starvation hurt too much on the way down.

Broad generalizations are nice, but my experience on HN shows that it’s also people who don’t understand the law. Complaints about cookie banners and popups that you’re powerless to stop as an American do exist.

Even in the EU anyone savvy enough gets a filter. A cookiebar isn't mandatory - ignoring it just means you don't want their "analytics" and "targeted advertisements" cookies. That should be the default. Cookiebars are a conscious choice by the companies in question, explicitly designed to annoy you. The fact that it does should make you hate the companies, not the law protecting your rights.

powerless unless you get an extension for you browser and then never be pestered again.

Speaking as a European in NA, I love the GDPR but it doesn't actually do much for us here. Many services are GDPR compliant but only for people living in GDPR relevant countries. That is very unfortunate.

they just claim they are "job creators" and if they were fined it would force them to lay people off... then magically the public is behind them again because no one wants someone to lose a job. its a vicious circle that only benefits ultra large corps.

And then everyone unironically agrees how terrible it is that the overworked and underpaid warehouse worker won't be able to feed his family anymore. Like these jobs were ever doing a good job of feeding anyone on the $30k they pay.

As well as penalties diminishes as size grows. A small company might go bankrupt by a medium to large lawsuit or a large fine, while a large company can easily weather it off.

If a small to medium company invests heavily in something illegal and they are forced to stop with all the lost revenue that follows it would be devastating. For a large company, not so much. They can afford to fight a legal battle that delays when they should stop, in the meantime their illegal activity might have already yielded success.

And when Amazon dodges everything that gets thrown at them the burnt-out regulators will probably find some mom-and-pop store to take out their frustration on instead.