They need to increase the fine substantially for each repeated violation. After a few violations its going to be hard to justify a $50B fine to investors.
The fines also needs to be fair, not fixed cost. I think the EU has got the percentage-of-revenue approach right. A million dollar fine for a small company can be death-sentence while for a big player it is lose change, that is not fair.
I agree that percent of revenue is a much better metric to base these kinds of fines off of, but not without reservations -- a small company with high sales revenue but razor thin margin could get killed by a % revenue fine; this seems unfair to the little guy.
On the other hand, if the fine is % income or anything but % gross receipts, then of course the system will be gamed endlessly by accountants and lawyers to show the smallest possible net number. The end result might be worse than a fixed fine. So % of revenue it is.
Totally agree, at the third time there is really no excuse anymore to not bump this up to maybe even threaten the existence of an organization or it changes its behavior.
For FB this is the nth time. I don't even know what n is anymore.
No, they need to adjust the first-time penalties for deterrence. $50B at a minimum, because it has to hurt their stock price when they do these things. Or hey, how about a year of revenue.