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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

There's a huge incentive for both EU and Google to have the latter just pay a fine every now and then and remain in business.

I see this as an indirect way to solve the problem of tax havens, because little known fact: the money that goes to pay the fines effectively reduces the pool of EU member contributions, because it's distributed using the same method.

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You're implying this huge incentive is money.

The EU is not short on money, and its existence and effectiveness do not hinge on how much money it "makes".

Google is pretty big, but not that big if compared to 27 sovereign countries and their combined GDPs.

The biggest problem the EU has is credibility with its populations. Taking on online privacy for their citizens was a huge win. It made a lot of people aware that the EU can be more than boring fish-quota and agricultural subsidies.

The chance of Google getting away with paying a fine every now and then is pretty much non-existent.

To illustrate: Google has a yearly revenue of ~90 Billion Euros. The maximum penalty for violating the GDPR is 4% of that = 3.6 Billion Euros. The EU has ~450 Million citizens without the UK.

If the EU fined Google for the maximum amount (which is rare) every year, it would raise 8 Euros per citizen.

Our politicians have better things to do.

That seems wrong. For only 4% revenue tax a company could just completely ignore the laws and just pay the fine as a cost of business.

It doesn't just get fined, it also gets ordered to stop. If it refuses, I guess the usual mechanism the state uses to make them comply apply.

There is no cap of 4% per year. If you just continue your violations the EU can continue levying fines and go past the 4% until you comply with the lawful order. I am not sure what the cap is in practice, because as far as I know no company has continued to just ignore EU for more than a few months.

I think the only cap is that at some point, a company has no property left in the EU that can be confiscated and all their managers the EU can get hold of are imprisoned for contempt of court. There is no way that the EU just gives up saying "oh well, we tried".

The EU copyright directive won't help its image once enacted. They may come to wish it remained more about boring fish quotas.

I don't think not passing the GDPR or not trying to improve the EU's image would have prevented the copyright directive.

> There's a huge incentive for both EU and Google to have the latter just pay a fine every now and then and remain in business.

For the EU, making a decision frequently means getting the consensus of 28 governments with sometimes very different ideologies. I don't think it's capable of plotting.

Individual governments on the other hand are, and in this case their interests align.

Sure. You have twenty-eight governments, each with multiple ministers. A mix of socialists, liberals, christian democrats and fascists. None of them value markets and low taxes (the difference between liberals and socialists is that the latter like red). They somehow trust each other to keep their conspiracy secret. Oh, and half the European Parliament is part of the plot as well.

At the same time, they have serious problems agreeing on tax reform. Because somehow, their interests are only aligned when it comes to secretly taxing Google.

Please take off your tinfoil hat. When the EU properly taxes Google, it will do so openly.

They somehow trust each other to keep their conspiracy secret.

That's not what I said. What I said was that each government individually decided that it was in their interest to fine Google.

No EU-level plotting - just incentives.

The heads of government and ministers don't get to keep the fines for themselves. It's in their self-interest to get themselves bribed by Google, not to fine them.

Secretly taxing Google by making a privacy law, giving businesses years to prepare for it and hoping Google violates it anyway doesn't even make sense. Taxing them using, well, taxes is easier, quicker and more likely to work.

Taxing them using, well, taxes is easier, quicker and more likely to work.

Is it really? To date Google et consortes managed to dogdge just about any tax law thrown at them. Meanwhile the fines are incurred and paid.

You're right. But that isn't because it's impossible to write a working tax law, but because the EU hasn't managed to agree on passing one without someone insisting on loopholes.

(The people who decided to expand the EU to 28 members without overhauling its decision-making processes, which were designed for a community of 5 members with a much more limited scope, must have been on drugs.)

You wrote that all countries are interested in money. To an extent that is of course true, and it also applies to Ireland.

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