I wouldn't be so sure, here across the pond we tend to slap these arrogant giants from time to time with few billions fine. Still just cost of doing their often amoral business, but often a big one.
These cases are fought for years, and theorized over for decades. In the meantime, the companies have gained or lost market share, profits and future revenues move in whatever direction, and the court ruling and the fine have little importance.
This may have been different some time ago. Nowadays, however, rest assured that no internet company will be deterred by pesky things such as laws, morality or ethics. If market share is at stake, that is.
This goes for Microsoft as much as for Google and Facebook. Google settles important cases (data related) to not have any legislative interference, and will pay the fine for everything else. Microsoft would be foolish to do anything else.
The companies are more powerful than the legal systems in the EU. Not the EU, mind you - if the will was there. But it isn't.
Look at the fines, look at the dollars actually being paid. And then look at the prospect of gaining 30,40 maybe 50% market share in the browser market - now that all bets are off and Microsoft has gone back to just siphoning off all data without even giving normal users a choice. Yeah.
Don't be naive.
> To date, Google has been found guilty of antitrust behavior in the cases related to Google AdSense and Android, and has been fined over €8 billion (~$9 billion)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...
> In the most recently reported fiscal year, Google's revenue amounted to 181.69 billion US dollars.
So over the course of a decade so far and ~4-5 different cases, the EU has fined Google for approximately 4% of their revenue of a single fiscal year.
Truly "slapping the giant".
*Edit: Conversion to dollars*
For example, if breaking the rules to earn 0.1% of revenue leads to the same penalty as breaking the rules to earn 100% of revenue, the company might as well maximize the scale of each rule broken to improve the risk-adjusted return.
More reasonably, a fine should be proportional to the amount of incremental revenue that the company obtained by engaging in the illegal conduct, and that should be multiplied by the odds of getting caught (so the fine can’t be amortized as a cost of doing business).
I think this rhetoric claiming that fines are just a slap on the wrist made sense at some point when we were talking about million-dollar settlements, but now we’re talking billions, and in some cases it’s so much money that the company certainly didn’t increase their revenue by that much by breaking the rules. I feel like people are just repeating the same old argument and they aren’t thinking critically about the numbers. Companies do, in fact, care about being fined billions of dollars! It’s a big deal! That kind of money really does drive corporate strategy! Try asking your CEO for a billion dollars to build a new product if you don’t believe me.
I’ve called the GDPR fines great because they’re finally actually hitting with real numbers.