Because if, as the regulator, you fail to benchmark what they gained then your laws can be ignored and your fines paid as simply a cost of doing business.
Its why you find the Australian regulator for consumer affairs handing out $200m+ fines to telecommunications companies, for example.
This entire issue is sidestepped by having graduated fines (which GDPR has). If they keep doing it the amount keeps going up until eventually they go out of business. It really limits the ability to take advantage of the system which hopefully makes it not worthwhile to bother doing.
Up to 4% of turnover. So if they make more than that it is still profitable to keep going.
Not that it is likely that they make that much in profit, but still. There probably shouldn’t be a limit, and there probably should be personal legal consequences such as jail time for repeat offenders.
By that logic regulators should lower fines if the action wasn’t profitable. Which creates an expensive legal fight around the net profits of some action were after guilt is determined.
Instead, it’s much better to scale fines based on the scale of the entity involved, which also results in huge fines, but it’s easier to measure revenue. Thus the fines are more broadly effective, and you can still escalate if they don’t stop.
Like in Finland where speeding ticket fines are based on your income. For instance, in one well known case a businessman was fined €121,000 for going 82 km/h in a 50 km/h zone.
>By that logic regulators should lower fines if the action wasn’t profitable.
The logic isn't some rigid "make the fine based on the profit".
The logic is based on the intent: make the behavior happen less.
So you can have a base fine of X, even when there's no profit or even if there are losses, and have a scalable fine based on higher profits. This way the company is discouraged to do the bad behavior in general, and is ALSO discouraged to do the bad behavior even if it's profitable.
I don't think that logic works. In your vein, if I say " If it gets hotter, I'll want it to be colder" that would imply that if it gets colder I'll want it to be hotter. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case thought.
If they made a profit and I want them to pay more than the base fine doesn't mean if they made a loss I want them to pay less than the base fine.
I think the rest of your come t stands though. There is difficulty I proving profit and Hollywood accounting can probably change those numbers.
So the parent saying "The fine is only part of the story. They likely spent more money than the fine fighting it over 5 years as fines increase next time if you don’t stop" doesn't invalidate the question of the grandparent, that, "sure, the fine cost them X, but how much they made?"
Even if the total cost (fine+fighting it in court) was larger, the question remains: yes, and what's that compared to what they made?
The fine is largely irrelevant, now they have faced enforcement we have a decision to file a Representative Actions Directive (equivalent of a US class action) claim with - the cost of that will be 100-1000x more than the fine and will likely lead to shareholder revolt as well (institutional shareholders will likely sue the parent Currys PLC for breach of fiduciary duty and not disclosing these issues during earnings calls and annual reports.)
So the fine is the first step to a much wider legal action.
The fine also puts other loyalty clubs on notice that if they do this, they are going to face consequences - so it has a much wider impact than simply monetary.
Just for fun I signed up. During the signup they say that by becoming a member you accept that they will send things via email etc, but its optional to accept this, you can still click the signup button but then you don't get membership status, you just get an account. Then on the kundklubb page it says that you are not a member, if you click join it will automatically enable email, sms and phone communication, but you can disable them.
Yes this is the difference, they did not allow you to opt out previously, they explicitly said that if you want to be in the club you have to accept their spam. Now they allow you not to accept their spam.
Now they rely on Soft Opt-In (which again might not be valid in your case, if you signed up to their site but didn't actually buy anything the soft opt-in exemption does not apply) so you may still have an actionable complaint here.