Hundreds of millions of euros in sanctions… which are still not paid. The culprits: companies in the new technology sector. The fines that several Gafam companies are reluctant to pay, in particular, can reach several billion euros. This week, for example, Australia confirmed that child pornography content.
Likewise, in Europe, the champions of new technologies are systematically poor payers. Meta has not yet paid the fines imposed by the Data Protection Commission (DPC, Irish equivalent of the CNIL, on which most Gafam, which have their headquarters in Ireland, depend), as confirmed to Agence France -Press (AFP) the Irish regulator. The latter mentions the total sum of 2.2 billion euros unpaid and about which Meta, contacted by The world, explains that he has no new elements to share. TikTok is no better student, and for its part owes 345 million euros to the DPC – joined by The worldthe social network claims to have appealed the DPC’s decision.
The Apple company recently lost a round in the standoff between it and Brussels, which estimates that the company must submit to Ireland to a tax catch-up of 13 billion euros: if the court of the European Union (EU) had initially annulled this decision, the Court of Justice of the EU finally recommended at the beginning of the month that the dispute be retried. The decision is expected in the coming months. In France, Apple has also been fighting for four years against a fine which, from 1.1 billion euros initially, was reduced on appeal to 371.6 million in 2022.
Fines paid less in Europe than elsewhere
For its part, Amazon appealed in 2021 the decision of the Luxembourg personal data regulator, thus delaying the moment to pay a penalty of 746 million euros. The instruction from the regulator, who first ordered the company to change its data processing method before January 15, 2022 under penalty of additional fines, has been suspended in the meantime by the president of the administrative court of Luxembourg. Google, finally, contests the fines imposed on it by European justice between 2017 and 2019, for a total of 8.2 billion euros.
Questioned by AFP, Graham Doyle, the deputy commissioner for data protection in Ireland, defended the record of his office, arguing that the fines represent only one facet of the consequences of the investigations carried out by the DPC, these having also allowed “to impose corrective measures”. According to him, if Instagram, for example, still has to pay a fine of 405 million euros, in a case currently under appeal, the investigation by the Irish CNIL would however have already made it possible to force the social network to resolve its data processing problem children.
As AFP points out, the European systems differ from the American and Chinese systems, in which fines are generally imposed following a long legal procedure. Thus, in the United States in 2019, Facebook, splashed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, settled its $5 billion fine, while Alibaba announced that it had immediately paid the $2.8 billion fine imposed by the Chinese regulator in 2021.