😁

You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments

They make $1.4B per day. This is basically just a cheap subscription for them

permalink
report
reply
1 point
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
106 points
*

For comparison, if you made $365,000 per year this would be the same as you paying 7 cents per day in a fine, or $25 per year.

If a fine is less than the profit it is legal and the cost of doing business.

permalink
report
parent
reply
20 points

Exactly right. Facebook will factor this in as am expected cost of doing business (if they didn’t already) and their stock will go up. This isn’t a penalty, this is just like paying a bribe. In the end, both are just lining the pockets of officials more interested in appearing to do something for the next news cycle so they can get re-elected.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

Did you mean $365,000,000? Or did you get confused by the “.”? Cause that’s used as a comma for numbers in a lot of European countries, so it’s $100k per day, not $100.

Also, it’d be exactly 10 cents per day, since $365k per year would be $1k per day, which 100 is 10% of.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

No, they meant 100k is 0.0071428571429% of 1.4b, and 26 is the same percent of 365k. Basically, if you made 365k a year and had an equal percentage fine, it would come out to less than 7 cents per day.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
66 points
*

From the article:

$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.

This is a reasonable observation and I wonder what Meta would do once one of their services becomes unprofitable in a specific country. Anyway if you add Instagram and WhatsApp to the math, maybe they would still generate profits from the Norwegian userbase

permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points

I wonder if this is a big amount for Norway’s government. After 3 years you’ve got 100 million dollars. Not huge but you could build a nice hospital or something with that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
14 points

per capita, iirc, Norway is richer than U.S.

they don’t need to fine fecesbook to get rich

permalink
report
parent
reply
11 points

Not really, they have the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Dude, Norway is one of the richest countries in the world.

permalink
report
parent
reply
17 points

I think the 2 points the article makes about that are pretty valid though. It’s most probably more than Facebook’s revenue in this single country plus it’s just the beginning.

permalink
report
parent
reply
21 points

It must be nice to live in a country that actively protects its people.

permalink
report
parent
reply
15 points

I would love for the EU to just go all-out hardcore privacy protection and fine GAFAM et al. into fucking oblivion for not complying. If they shut down services, that’s probably for the better, although it will be a rough awakening for most people (probably including myself)

permalink
report
parent
reply
11 points
*

Companies operate at a loss in certain markets all the time in order to keep competition out. Even if they’re not profitable in Norway, they don’t want a Norwegian social network muscling in on their territory.

“Competition is for losers.” - Peter Thiel, first investor in Facebook and mentor of Mark Zuckerberg

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

But I really hope this sets a precedent for all other countries, need money to finance something? Just tax the shit out of Facebook. Of course it’s a joke, we should properly tax them in the first place, or better yet force them not to exploit people data for profit

permalink
report
parent
reply
48 points

I don’t know where you’re getting that number but it’s definitely wrong. Their most profitable year so far was 2021, and they made $39.4 billion for the entire year. Source

permalink
report
parent
reply
11 points
*
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply

Ah. Got that number from a Google search. Thanks for telling me.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

So assuming things haven’t changed too much for them, this is about 1%. Barely noticeable.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

I mean, I want them to pay as much as possible, but 1% of their global revenue, for just a small country like Norway, still seems pretty decent.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

No, it’s 0.1%. But Norway could be less than 1% of their market, so it’s somewhat significant.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

it’s not $100 as OP wrote, it’s $100000

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points

Hope he didn’t write $100 Americans just refuse to acknowledge the existence of other cultures and can’t be bothered to try to learn to understand them.

The presence of multiple zeros after the decimal point is the big clue you know.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

I see, but I’ve never encountered that in my life.

I’m not American, I’m from Australia and watch a lot of overseas content. I guess I just didn’t encounter it then.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Still meaningless with zero effect on company value.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Not really.

Norway has 5,391,369 people, and assuming ~40% use facebook, that’s 2 million people that use facebook. 36.5 million dollars per year of fines mean that it’s 18 dollars per user per year.

Facebook has 2 billion users worldwide, and has a revenue of 33 billion every year. If all of those 2 billion users fined facebook for 18 dollars per year, that’s their whole revenue gone.

It just doesn’t have that much effect right now because it’s only norway doing it.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Is there any post about some fine for a tech company where this isn’t the top comment?

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Maybe not, but it is a good reminder each time anyway.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

Where are you getting that number? Their financial reports claim about 120 billion a year in revenue. Or 0.4 billion per day.

That’s for about 3.5 billion users. Let’s say Norwegians, being quite rich, generate ten times the daily average, or about $1 per day. I don’t know how accurate it is, but this page claims about 80% of Norwegians use Facebook. With 5.5 million people, that would put their daily revenue for Norway at about 4 million. So this fine would equate to about 2.5% of their revenue. With a net profit of about 25% (it has varied from 20-30 the last few years) that’s about 10% of their profits.

It’s not exactly going to put them out of business, but it doesn’t seem too bad, proportionally, even with the numbers as generous as possible to your case. If India did the same (just adjusting 100k for population size) it’d be 25 million a day, or ten billion a year.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Privacy

!privacy@lemmy.ml

Create post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

Community stats

  • 4.6K

    Monthly active users

  • 2.9K

    Posts

  • 78K

    Comments