[petcat]

The EU fines are not enough to get the US tech companies to change, or even leave completely. But they are enough to continually fund the EU regulatory bureaucracy itself. So this arm of the government really only exists to preserve itself.

I would be interested to see how many EU government jobs the US tech fines are supporting. Maybe Meta or Google is indirectly the largest employer in Brussels?

[PunchyHamster]

Incorrect. Plenty of changes made because of that, they just apply only to EU member countries coz they still want to sell the data about other country's citizens

[ginko]

> But they are enough to continually fund the EU regulatory bureaucracy itself

Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? The EU budget is hundreds of billions of Euros. Even the largest fines so far would be a drop in the bucket compared to that. But more importantly it's the individual member states that invoke those fines (like Ireland with the €1.2B GDPR fine on Meta) not the EU itself.

[rusk]

Another way to read this is the tech companies are stupidly bankrolling the EU by not complying with the laws of the lands (EU states voluntarily enact their own implementations of EU directions in return for a slice). That’s far too good a cash cow to pass up. Keep it coming.