New Delhi:
Rarely a month goes by without big tech companies being fined for price fixing, crushing competitors or misusing data, but it can take years before they pay a single cent.
Ireland’s data regulator confirmed to AFP that Meta has not paid any of the two billion euros ($2.2 billion) in fines imposed since September last year. TikTok also owes hundreds of millions.
Amazon is still appealing against a 746 million euro fine from 2021, Luxembourg’s data regulator told AFP.
Google is still contesting EU fines worth more than eight billion euros for abusing its market position between 2017 and 2019.
Apple has been fighting a French antitrust fine of 1.1 billion euros and an order to pay 13 billion euros in taxes to Ireland for years.
The problem is constant, global, and includes tech companies of all sizes, not just the big four.
This week, Australia confirmed that X (formerly Twitter) had not paid a fine imposed for failing to outline its plans to ban content depicting child sexual abuse, although
Critics say fining tech companies won’t stop their bad behavior and it’s time for more drastic action.
Margarida Silva, a researcher at the Dutch NGO Center for Research on Multinationals, pointed out that tech companies have long enjoyed their reputation for “disruption.”
“Not paying the fines fits in with the way we’ve seen major tech companies challenge virtually any enforcement of the rules against them,” Silva said.
“Even if the company ultimately loses, by then they will have dragged the administration through years and years of spending.”
This sets technology apart from sectors like finance, she argued, where there is still an incentive to pay up to reassure the public and investors.
But Romain Rard, a lawyer at Gide Loyrette Nouel in Paris, said it was common sense for companies to appeal against stiff penalties.
“It’s not like companies can just ignore the fine, challenge decisions and hope for the best that they can get away without paying anything,” he told AFP.
And there have been notable successes for the companies: chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm both recently overturned or drastically reduced billion-dollar antitrust fines in the EU on appeal.
The European system is different from jurisdictions such as China or the United States, where fines often come at the end of a lengthy process and are announced as a settlement.
In 2019, Facebook paid a record $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
And e-commerce giant Alibaba told investors in 2021 that it was immediately paying a record nearly $3 billion fine to Chinese regulators in 2021.
Activists argue that these companies are simply too wealthy for financial sanctions to have much impact.
Austrian lawyer Max Schrems, who has campaigned vigorously for data rights in Europe, said the problem was made worse by the uneven application of the rules.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, he said, gave companies too much leeway in their appeals and issued fines that were far too low.
In an interview with AFP, Ireland’s deputy data protection commissioner, Graham Doyle, defended his office’s record and said fines were only part of the story.
“With the vast majority of these investigations that we have completed, while the fines typically generate the most publicity, we have also imposed corrective actions,” he said.
He highlighted an investigation into Instagram for their handling of children’s data.
An appeal against a €405 million fine is currently underway, but Doyle emphasized that the platform had already resolved the original problem.
Activists agree that fines can only be part of the solution.
Silva argued that it was time for competition regulators to take action, rather than dwelling on imposing financial sanctions.
She urged them to halt future takeovers and mergers in the sector and undo the damage of the past, possibly even breaking up the companies.
“Meta’s problem would be very different if it had not been allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp,” she said.
AFP has asked Meta for a response.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)