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.

And how much did it make them over those 5 years?

You don't know how much it did cost them. Why would you care about how much they gained ? You can't compare something when you have neither value.

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.

You can apply a fine multiple times in a year if they don’t stop. As that 4% is based on global revenue you’re eventually going to make it unprofitable.

Huh. Any idea if it's individual fines or total fines that are capped? It never occurred to me before.

Anyway this is all purely academic. 99% of violations aren't going to increase profit by more than the maximum fine (or even anywhere remotely near that) thus it seems to me that the law has sufficiently broad coverage for addressing a behavior that does not directly result in physical injury.

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.

And before anyone calls this crazy, note that jail time costs you your time, whatever that's worth. This is the same idea without the physical incarceration.

Most rich people still make money when they're in jail. Only people who work for a living stop making money.

Rich and retired are very different thing. A CEO can be out hundreds of millions due to a long prison sentence, but most fines don’t scale nearly that far.

That's considerably more than someone near me who was doing 245km/h in a 90 zone (Well 55mph which is 89km/h). I still don't know why that person didn't lose their license (other than the obvious fact that they were rich enough to afford the Lamborghini that they were driving in); it wasn't just any 55 zone, it was one with a reputation for being dangerous.

Damn, it sucks that people are allowed to get away with that kind of speed. Here in Denmark the mandatory minimum for doing over 200 km/h is losing your license for 3 years, confiscation of the vehicle and a ~$2000 fine. Unfortunately punishment isn't enough to get rid of this thing as around 1000 cars are confiscated each year. Some of them are confiscated for other reasons, like driving with a BAC above 0.2%.

If they had even temporarily impounded the car it probably would cost the driver more than the ticket, since exotic cars are likely to get damaged when towed.

Note that driving laws are entirely at the state level in the US, and this was California, which is among the most driver-friendly places in the (already driver-friendly) US. There are places in the US where the license could have been suspended for this (though typically with a duration measured in days, not years).

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.

> 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’m not saying they would get a rebate just that for this to be meaningful for a mid sized or larger company requires a large portion of a given fine to be based on profits. So a company receiving a fine based on their profits would argue they made less money from the behavior, it’s a legal argument without any risk.

Consider a fine for a mid sized company that’s base 100k + 10m based on profits it ‘goes away’ if they win but it also ‘goes away’ if they drop it by 99%. Thus just as much effort would be spent on how much money they made as is put forth to defend the fine in the first place.

Now obviously you could set the base large enough to offset that, but doing so defeats the point of profit based fines in the first place. Which means inherent to the idea of profit based fines is the concept they largely go away if a major company can argue their profits where non existent.

It's a nice theory, but only works if the company gets caught and fined enough times to make a difference. Even a zillion dollar fine is useless if the law isn't applied. Also, when the fine comes out of corporate coffers, not individuals' pockets, there is less incentive to comply with the law. If you really want results, fines should come out of management's personal bank accounts, not to mention some jail time.

Sure, if the regulator doesn't move to enforce then the law won't have any effect but at least to me that sounds like a problem with the government as opposed to a justification for draconian penalties.

Targeting management seems like a tactic that should only be employed where great urgency exists such as life threatening danger. I don't think marketing material is anywhere close to qualifying.

I hate my inbox being inundated with spam as much as the next guy but that doesn't mean drawing and quartering the perpetrators is justified.

> I hate my inbox being inundated with spam as much as the next guy but that doesn't mean drawing and quartering the perpetrators is justified.

Fining executives is hardly drawing and quartering.

>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.

Nobody is giving people at a government agency the authority to write arbitrary fines, there’s going to be at minimum guidelines.

If the base fine is X, then every actual fine would be X + Y where Y is the profit motive causing the behavior. As such every court case is now also a fight about lowering Y and companies are incentivized to make Y appear lower etc.

Further as companies vary in size generally at large companies Y will be vastly larger than X meaning lowering Y is nearly as valuable at winning.

> By that logic regulators should lower fines if the action wasn’t profitable

No? You don’t need to adjust the floor, only the ceiling.

The goal is to prevent businesses from pricing fines into their margins.

Well, isn't that my point exactly?

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.

Did Elgiganten change how it works yet?

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.