The singling out of US multinationals is a bit of a myth, it's just more visible to us tech people and since the revenues are larger, the fines also tend to be larger. But they also fined Daimler, Scania, DAF, Philips, Volvo, Deutsche Bank, etc.
http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/editorcharts/EU-GOOGLE-...
Are we talking about the same EU that is currently attempting to ban encryption?
Put simply, given how large the EU market is, and how strong its regulation is, it is cheaper for companies to comply, even outside of the market.
*also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.
The tech companies don't have much bargaining power in the EU because of that.
Influencing a not completely corrupted government is not as simple as money in - laws out. That would work equally well everywhere.
Also, all highly advanced democracies have some lobbying. It is not viewed widely by political scientists as corruption.
Lobbying isn't equivalent to corruption.
While the two can get very similar in the US because US elections have no campaign spending cap, therefore politicians (and even some civil servants) have a constant need for massive political donations, in general lobbying is a lot more complex than "spend money, get law you like". It usually involves a high amount of, you guessed it, waiting around in lobbies.
In the EU, the stereotypical industry lobbyist is a guy who will invite some commission members to a very fancy restaurant and tell them "About this regulation you're passing, we've prepared a full binder on it, with different policy options you could consider, case studies illustrating the trade-offs of each option, ideas for further research, etc".
Bureaucrats know that the content of the binder will be biased towards the interests of the companies that funded it, but they still read it because it's full of industry information and technical knowledge they don't have.
There's allegedly a bit of give and take, where they expect the info to be biased, but not too obviously biased otherwise they stop returning your calls.
Good bureaucrats will then cross-reference that info with info from competing interest groups, researchers, wikipedia, etc, and hope that they end up with a balanced view of the industry. Bad bureaucrats will just copy the biggest group's proposed laws verbatim.
But in any case, calling it "rampant corruption" is just ignorant. There's a lot of thought put into that process beyond "do what the corporations want".
Too late to edit.
> *also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.
Firstly, corruption is not "rampant" in the European Union, it is on average the least corrupt political organization on this planet: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022
Secondly, lobbying is not corruption, it is legalized, registered and regulated in most EU members and at the Union's level even more so.
If interest groups cannot communicate their interests to politicians, how do you expect politicians to inform their votes, make laws, and take decisions? Should they just guess or know everything about every topic they are solicited about? Should they "Google" the answers (the irony here should strike you in regards to the original post)?
Because believe it or not, corporations are legally people and are required to obey the law. Not above the law, like in the US.
Lobby all you want, but weigh the cost of having an entire market worth millions of people denied to your business. Comply or GTFO.
There is no such thing in the EU. You can't just waltz into the European parliament and lobby (read: bribe) your way into regulations that favor you like it's the case in the USA. Once the parliament votes on something, it's done.
The Council and the Commission would like to have a word with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_trilogue_meeting
eu seem to care about its citizens it seems. so, it might be dumbfounding for citizens of nations with government who give zero fucks about its own citizens.
> lobbying
in other countries, it is called bribery. most of the time, it's illegal.
Because lobbying isn't equivalent to corruption and doesn't automatically get you the laws you want.
The European Commission had a three months comment period in 2020 where various interest groups (FAANGs, non-profits, media groups, open-source giants like Mozilla, etc) all submitted their position (which IIRC usually boiled down to "yeah, regulating is awesome, please regulate everyone but me!"). It submitted its report in December 2020, at which point most of the key points were already decided.
No doubt interest groups sent a lot of people to lobbies in the following years to discuss details and push in one direction or another, but by then the commission and parliament had a pretty good idea what they wanted the final law to look like anyway.
Not that I'm complaining of course, but still, quite a surreal moment.
[0]: https://www.engadget.com/eu-confirms-the-six-tech-giants-sub...
The 6 companies are Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, ByteDance, and Microsoft.