While I am in favour of efforts like the GDPR to protect users data, I wonder if all this anti-bigtech sentiment is actually justified and where it will eventually lead to
With a small fine, it's just an annoying cost of doing business. With this ruling, there's a possibility it may actually change the risk/benefit assessment for companies that insist on doing whatever they want with user data.
Maybe the lines of business which require promiscuous data sharing in order to be profitable will stop operating in the EU, and give rise to other business models. Whether these newer ones will be better or worse is not yet known, though the gamble in the EU is that it won't be worse.
If you’re in favor of efforts like the GDPR, why do you call this anti-bigtech sentiment? It’s pro-privacy sentiment.
The GDPR applies to smalltech, too, and smalltech gets fined. For example, an individual got fined €600 about two months ago for pointing a video camera at a shared access road (https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-1397)
The EU appeal the article is about has nothing at all to do with GDPR, user data, or privacy.
It's about anticompetitive behaviour, i.e. antitrust. Antitrust is not particularly about tech companies, and it has been around a long time, since before modern computers.
It's about misusing a position of market dominance to prevent a healthy competitive market from operating. Very large companies which are market-dominant face this problem, but they also have the resources to understand and handle the responsibility. They can either do so, or face fines and injunctions to make them do so. In severe cases they can be forced to break up dominant business units, such as happened with the breakup of AT&T in the USA some years ago.
This is the same sort of thing as might have blocked nVidia from buying ARM, for example (until nVidia pulled out voluntarily). You can see how that has nothing to do with GDPR; it wasn't even in the EU.
> In contrast, there is no evidence that large technology companies, such as Facebook and Google, experienced any reductions in either sales or profits.
I'd say they might need to revise that. I think Google just saw a 4 billion euro reduction in profit.
For your first point, that’s more or less what the Digital Market Act is and it was adopted in July. They call “platforms” “gatekeepers” but you got the idea of it. It should become enforceable by Q3 2023.
It is a long time coming and still a long way to go and the surveillance big tech giants should pay a high price for abusing and violating the privacy of hundreds of millions of users.
It's a shame that this fine is too generous to Google and it won't scare them. It should be much larger than that and should be in the multi-billions of dollars.