> $100,000 per day for a country with ~5.4 million people is a lot. If even 20 percent used Facebook regularly, then that would still be 10 cents per user per day. It's unlikely that Meta is generating so much profit per user - every day.
TFA underestimates the value of user data.
From [1]:
> by the end of 2022, Meta’s [average revenue per user] worldwide was $10.86. While in US & Canada, it was $58.77; in Europe, it was $17.29; in Asia, $4.61 and in the rest of the world, it was $3.52.
$17.29 ARPU, per quarter, comes out at about 19 cents per day. Sure, revenue, not profit, but this is still way above 10c/day.
And this is only in Europe, and it doesn't account for all revenue user data can generate. Once adtech has user data, it can sell it in perpetuity on data broker markets, which is likely where the long tail revenues come from. Long after the user stops using FB, or even if they don't use FB at all (shadow profiles).
So this fine from a small country is just the cost of doing business for Meta. If every EU country did this, and the fines were incremental, then it _might_ cause Meta to rethink their strategy in the EU.
In 1885 he helped found and lead the Provisional Government of Saskatchewan on land traditionally inhabited by Métis people. After a series of battles that spring, the Provisional Government was defeated by Canadian troops. The country had been in existence for just 62 days. Riel was subsequently captured, convicted and hanged.
My personal preference would be: 100000 (monetary symbol), but, I also understand that others might prefer the symbol before the numeric (i.e. $100000), even though you would not say "Dollars one hundred thousand" in English.
The closest you get to an international standard (that not many use) is the International Bureau of Weights and Measures recommending (ideally thin) spaces (so "10 000")
Interesting! Do you know of any countries that use the underscore? I believe I've seen France(...?) use spaces as a separator, but I've never come across the underscore.
Personally I would like some means of breaking up units of triplets that could be used universally. It's frustrating that there isn't a standard across the globe for such crucial means of expression. It wasn't until fairly recently that I learned that the comma wasn't the universal standard.
Spaces cause ambiguity with separate values like 123 456. Underscores are ambiguous with missing values due to the common use of a line segment to indicate where to fill out form values in addition to the same separate values issue as spaces.
Bahraini Dinar (and some other Dinars I believe) use 3 digits for their currency. I wouldn't assume no dollar does it. Sure, it's very unlikely. But if you've never dealt with some other currency, it may not by that obvious.
Prior to the decimalization of the stock market, I'd see $42.0625 and similar prices. 0.0625 being 1/16th of a dollar.
Post 2001, the requirements are that that stocks traded for under $1.00 may have a minimum spread of $0.0001 and so you still can see it and have to work with it.
It took me a minute. My brain saw the period and then truncated the third zero to make sense of it. This is pretty common in humans. But because I thought that one hundred dollars was odd, I read the article, which I then realized it was one hundred thousand.
Cent is short for 'centime' or 1/100th, so indeed, nobody is using three digits to represent cents. But there are currencies with finer grained denominations than cents.
Think of it as a starting point. I'm all for applying network algorithms to fines like this: if you don't back off we'll double the fine. Every time it is levied.
And if the company can't pay then the execs are on the hook, everybody with a C-level title or a board seat. I would happily wager this would get even the largest entities into compliance within days, weeks at most.
The doubling of fines was tried successfully against microsoft back in the web 1.0 when they refused to acknowledge the antitrust fine.
Basically the EU(or even Norway) is way to big a market for advertisements for the industry to just ignore so sooner of later adtech will fold and play nice.
Meta makes (revenue) ~25 billion a year from EU. Very crudely compensating for Norway vs EU population (~5 vs 450 million), you'd estimate ~250-300 million revenue per year from Norway.
36M USD per year then works out to like 10-15% of yearly revenue. Meta reports overall operating margin in the 20-30% range, so 10-15% revenue loss is significant, but not immediately deadly... which seems to match the stated intent of Norwegian authorities.
Getting banned in multiple western countries (this won't be the last case like this I suspect) for refusal to comply with their democratically-valid laws is a great way to end up a corporate pariah.
If they choose to only operate in markets which let them operate entirely as they see fit, they may find themselves soon with no markets left to operate in.
Money from advertising. Sure, they can cut off everyone who tried to sue them... but won't last long that way. Also they could be still sued for the past non-compliance instead.
Lol indeed: throw their execs in jail when they transit through a country with which they have an extradition agreement (plenty of precedent for that), freeze or seize their assets, block them at the ISP level (ISPs would have to play ball unless they themselves would want to be come a target).
The idea that some crap company outranks a nation state with millions of citizens is ridiculous.
Also: even though Norway isn't part of the EU (though it is in Schengen) they could bring a case in the EU courts and have Meta's assets in Ireland seized. That would really hurt if the court allowed it.
Trust me, if was a Facebook exec I wouldn't lose ANY sleep over it. Norway has 5 millon people, it doesn't have any leverage and it's largely irrelevant.
Not to disrespect Norway bros, but it's the truth.
I'm not going to trust you. The EU has shown time and again that it is perfectly capable of dealing with asshole companies and Norway, even though it isn't in the EU has enough standing with the Union and the Nordics separately to get them to take this serious.
There is probably a reason that you are not a Facebook exec, and no disrespect to you but you are clueless about how large companies interact with the law. They'll scream, they'll sue, they'll haggle and they will delay but ultimately they fold. The same has already happened to big telco's, many large IT companies, industrial giants etc, FB is no exception.
Correct. From what I can read in the decision letter, Metas local Norwegian subsidiary, named "Facebook Norway AS", is being held collectively responsible for "fine of up to NOK 1 000 000 per day of non-compliance on Meta Platforms Ireland Limited and/or Facebook Norway AS" - https://www.datatilsynet.no/contentassets/36ad4a92100943439d...
FB has datacenters in Denmark and Sweden, countries that are very friendly with Norway and that have plenty of treaties between them, such as the Helsinki Treaty. Piss one off enough and you might find that four countries go after you in sync.
And seizing those DC's is childs play for a nation state, where are they going to take them?
They don't have to, is the thing. If Facebook can't operate as a business in their country, then they can't collect advertising revenue there, can't run FB marketplace, etc.
Facebook has always had the option to not operate as a business in a country, that they do is because it's profitable to do so.
It's worth noting that not paying fines in one country is a serious enough deal for the entire European Economic Area that it can escalate to that company not being allowed to do any trade in the entire EEC.
And this fine will increase if Facebook dont comply, it's been done before to even bigger targets like Microsoft(back when windows/office was still relevant) so just being big wont save Facebook here.
It's relatively common IME to see cynical, anti-government sentiment from HN commenters. Perhaps these comments are aimed at the US. But stories like this out of Norway show that not all national governments are useless. Some national governments are trying to address the problem of so-called "tech" companies.
I find it interesting that the _smaller_ countries imposes these restrictions and fines as their way of generating revenue. $100,000 a day I can imagine is a fair bit for Norway.
Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund made a gain of 1,501 billion crowns or $143 billion USD in H1 2023. That's roughly $781 million USD per day in the first half of this year. I don't think this fine was about revenue generation.
This fine represents no more than a very small fraction of a percent of Norway's GDP. Let's generously assume $1B / day, then $100k per day is 4 decimal orders of magnitude less or 0.01%.
Why do you believe that? There's lots of evidence[1] of other countries issuing larger fines to social media companies. The point of these is to force the behavior to stop, not to raise money. A lower fine would probably raise more money in total, as the behavior could continue long term.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756101
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37045185