The judgement requires Meta to change their platforms within 2 weeks so that the user's choice is persistent. If not implemented in 2 weeks, there is a daily penalty of €100'000, up to a maximum of €5 million.
As an addition, 5 million is a lot for BoF. At the end of 2024 their balance was a little over 1.8 million EUR. Even a single day's worth of coercive fine (100k EUR) would be meaningful to them.
> Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a!
That is the implication. The point of the first fine isn't to actually hurt Meta. It's to signal that there will be consequences, that the excuse of "but we thought it was legal" is gone now and give them one final chance to get their act together.
It's to pre-emptively clear away any possibility for Meta to appeal to either higher courts or the court of public opinion that they're being treated unfairly. Which they would do if you immediately hit them with a say, €5 billion fine.
The thing about ignoring courts' orders is... well, courts don't exactly look favorably on people who ignore them. Looking forward to court's round 2, then.
They are not going to ignore it. They are going to appeal it with a hundred lawyers and a truckload of documents with arguments, and somehow get it watered down. This is what it looks like from my pov anyway.
I think courts are generally swayed by many lawyer-hours and many legal-sounding-documents, because the judges are law professionals too, and naturally they think the profession is admirable, and so is doing so much legal analysis.
Maybe the judges in NL are better than that, what do I know.
It’s an intentional slap on the wrist because they don’t actually want to fine them, they just want them to change their behaviour. The general MO of European courts is to get people to comply, not to punish non compliance. There’s a subtle difference. If Meta change their tact in the next two weeks then they got what they wanted. If they don’t, fine increases and they’ll escalate responses.
Some useful context here is that the Netherlands is holding a general election on 29 October, which is why the deadline of two weeks was imposed. If Meta does not comply with the two weeks deadline and instead pays the (tiny) $5 million fine, that could have serious consequences for the democratic process in the Netherlands. Escalating after two weeks might be too little, too late.
That’s actually really interesting to know. I don’t think it would have serious implications if they chose to pay, but I do think it will be catastrophic if meta refuse to change and NL don’t escalate to the point of forcing compliance.
This is 5 million for this particular court case. Nothing is preventing others from filing their own, very similar cases. If Meta ignores the court's decision, a second lawsuit may end much worse for them.
Though, practically speaking, America has been threatening to make the trade war they started much worse for the EU if it tried to enforce things like DSA and GDPR fines. We'll have to see how enforceable these laws really are.
The US wouldn't be doing this if these American tech companies weren't lobbying the government hard to kill the DSA & GDPR. It seems like all regulatory enforcement is out of the window with this administration, so if they can kill the European regulations, they're free to do as they like. The scoping of the trade war as the US having a deficit with all countries by not counting services is ridiculous, it's the most important sector of the economy, and the US has a massive surplus in services.
Ding ding ding! If the EU had even the tiniest of balls, they would've accepted the US tariffs with open arms while applying equivalent ones on services at the same time. Glazing Trump during the announcement about how great of an idea it is to institute these things, how much fairer they make it.
Na, but under the Dutch legal you can go back to the court if they pay the 5 million without changing anything and ask if they can increase it cus it clearly wasn’t enough. They’ll just keep tacking zeroes on.
Yes and no. The judge can choose to tack on zeroes to make Meta comply, but they may also find that monetary fines are not sufficient and take other measures. This is not just a money printing machine you can keep coming back to.
If Meta can provide a reasonable time frame for compliance, the judge may also choose to let the existing limit on reparations stand rather than increase it, despite them not complying the day they hit the 5 million euro mark.
It's all up to what the judge deems reasonable to make Meta comply with the court's orders.
> 5.3. orders Meta Ireland to pay BoE a penalty of €100,000.00 for each day or part thereof that it does not, or does not fully, comply with the orders under 5.1 and/or 5.2, up to a maximum total of €5,000,000.00.
Original:
> 5.3. veroordeelt Meta Ierland om aan BoE een dangsom te betalen van € 100.000.00 oor iedere dag of gedeelte daarvan dat zij niet of niet volledig aan de beelen onder 5.1 en/of 5.2 oldoet. tot een maximum an in totaal € 5.000.000.00 is bereikt.
It seems like usually they start with smaller fines, and if the offense is repeated, they ramp it up. Kind of makes sense.
> but generally speaking I'd like to see allocating jailtime across the top shareholders as an option.
Shareholders don’t control day to day operations of a company. Top shareholders rarely have enough shares by themselves to control anything about the company. Remember the VW emissions cheating scandal where people were jailed? It would be completely unreasonable to jail top shareholders because some manager somewhere concocted a scheme to cheat on emissions.
Jailing top shareholders for decisions made by the company would be a weird misdirected use of the justice system. If someone is to be jailed, it should be people responsible for the decision.
That said, I can’t believe anyone would be watching the news about the current U.S. administration threatening companies with spurious and often nonsensical demands and think that we should be normalizing the process of letting the government jail individuals if the company does something the government doesn’t like that would have previously been a small fine. You can’t think of any way this power might be abused by elected officials?
The only sense in which punishment of any kind is reasonable is when it works to disincentivise harmful behavior. If higher risks for shareholders convince them to take a more active role in ensuring that their investment isn't causing harm to the rest of us, then they're at least as reasonable than any other sort of punishment.
If the cheating had gone unnoticed, the shareholders would've been rewarded, so they should bear some risk whether or not they sold after the crime was committed.
As it is, we've got incentives set up to encourage investment in bad behavior so long as you get out before your people get caught.
As for the government abusing the justice system... What rules would create justice is sort of orthogonal to the circumstances under which the rules are broken.
There was a thread recently about sanctions, and how if you break that, executives can actually go to jail.
It is obviously known how to get corporations to comply, and the mechanism is used when governments really want to. In this case and others like it, probably they don't care enough.
That how you build up a case for transferring control. First its "lol, 5m is a pocket change" and it becomes argument of politicians for tighter control over Meta. Then Zuck says they are trying to make the world a better place but it doesn't stick, people side with the politician who is building a career by sticking it to Meta.
The judgement requires Meta to change their platforms within 2 weeks so that the user's choice is persistent. If not implemented in 2 weeks, there is a daily penalty of €100'000, up to a maximum of €5 million.