I don't know, a percentage of revenue hurts more than the same percentage of net profit. Maybe some companies need to be forced to operate at a net loss until they clean up their act.
I'm not arguing about the fines themselves, those can indeed be scaled by revenue. I also agree that many fines should be higher to prevent companies from merely seeing them as an operating cost.
However, my point is that company revenue can't be used 1:1 to pay off fines. That doesn't take into account that revenue also has to cover all other operating expenses and taxes. As an example, the article states that Meta would take roughly 5½ days to pay off its fines, but taking the 23.42% profit margin into account a more realistic answer is 23½ days.
Gross. Can we start making fines meaningful? % of revenue maybe? I’m not an expert on this. But these fines should be more than enough to discourage behavior and not be “cost of doing business”.
The EU knows fines of 'up to' 4% of revenue for privacy violations, which means the company still gets to keep 96% of whatever it's made by breaking the law. The fine should be a minimum of 50%, plus jail time for the managers responsible. Any punishment that does not make the shareholders cry with fury is too low and will do nothing to change the situation.
