Unbelievable fines, that's the problem in this one case.

You've repeatedly claimed this fine is unbelievable, but that seems like a skill issue on your part. I have no trouble believing the reality of this fine. And tech corps should have no trouble believing it either. They better wisen up and respect the EU's laws if they think these fines are too large to bear (in reality, the worst violators can bear these fines just fine, and the EU should be issuing arrest warrants for the executives to make a real impact.)

The fines are escalatory. If Tiktok doesn’t wise up, the next one will _absolutely_ be bigger.

The reason you don’t hear about a lot of fines this size, is because most companies aren’t egregiously out of compliance and also correct things when first poked. TikTok did neither.

I suspect it's "unbelievable" because we are so used to fines being tiny "slaps on the wrist" that companies just treat as minor costs of doing business. Finally a real fine! When a company that makes $10B a year gets a fine of $100K, it's proportional to me getting a fine of $1. How is that effective?

Massive fines is the only deterrent for large corporations, it affects their bottom line, it can't be taken just as a cost to do business and ignored. When a corporation is on the hook for paying up to 4% of global revenue then the shareholders will care about not breaking the law.

That's the whole fucking point...

I think the fines should be far higher.

If a company chooses to leach data they have a large responsibility to ensure they handle children appropriately.

A massive recurring fine is much better than a ban.

Just fine them to death and they will cave. Just look at how scared Meta is in releasing Threads in the EU.

Whoa now, slow down there.

Ban some of what TikTok's doing and enforce it fairly? Sure. But let's not actually get more authoritarian here.

What next, we'll legislate away selling drugs to kids? I mean, kids have rights to the most addictive stuff known to mankind, too.

>What next, we'll legislate away selling drugs to kids?

And that worked out great; drug use among kids nowadays is way higher than it was in past, the drug industry is larger than ever, and cartel violence is killing countless more kids in the third world than drugs ever killed.

Bearing in mind that TikTok is itself banned in China. ;)

That's not exactly true. China has a firewall which restricts access to the internet at large so you can't use Tiktok or Instagram for that matter in China. Tiktok and Douyin (Tiktok in China) are essentially the same app. Douyin has more features and of course since it's in China, more content control.