[anoncake]

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.

[jolfdb]

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.

[jeltz]

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.

[anoncake]

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".

[anoncake]

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.