In 2024, tech giants Apple, Google, Meta✴, Amazon and Microsoft were regularly fined by authorities around the world for breaking laws. This could create the illusion that they were finally being called to account for anti-competitive practices, disregard for user privacy, and other violations. In reality, large companies pay back these colossal fines in a matter of days, and sometimes hours. And they have almost no impact on the net profit, noted specialists from the Swiss service Proton.
Image source: proton.me
Google was fined the most in 2024 – the total amount was just under $3 billion. If we take into account the company’s free cash flow, that is, revenue minus expenses for equipment, property and other items necessary for its work, the company is able to pay all its fines in approximately three weeks of work. Meta✴ needs less than two weeks to cover its $1.46 billion in fines. Amazon was fined only $57 million – an amount within the statistical error that is offset by just one day’s income. In other words, the fines imposed on tech giants are unlikely to be a significant deterrent for them.
Over the past three years, the size of fines imposed on tech giants has increased significantly. Formally, they are attempts by authorities to force companies to comply with laws, but in practice they turn out to be license fees to continue abuses. Google’s free cash flow for the first three quarters of 2024 was $47.9 billion, and the amount of fines for the entire year was $2.97 billion, or 16 times less. Meta✴ (formerly Facebook✴) has been fined more than $3.7 billion since 2022, but no one on the board is calling for the resignation of CEO Mark Zuckerberg – the actions that led to the fines have earned the company hundreds of billions of dollars.
Fines do not exhaust the list of payments that companies must make. In Ireland, Apple has counted $14 billion in unpaid taxes, and one of the largest class action lawsuits against the company involves an amount of $3.66 billion—it takes Apple 59 days, 5 hours and 19 minutes to earn $17.66 billion. The truth, Proton argues, is that the tech giants have taken control of the Internet—the world’s critical and irreplaceable infrastructure—and carved it up so that each company can control its own segment. It is more profitable for them to pay these fines indefinitely if they maintain control.
The authorities seem to be starting to learn this lesson. Increasingly, they are demanding from tech giants not only money, but also certain actions – a striking example is the European “Digital Markets Act” (DMA), according to which the region is trying to force Apple and Google to open the iOS and Android ecosystems. While American companies are resisting, proposing reforms that ignore the spirit of the law, it is understandable that the tech giants are unlikely to give up their monopolies voluntarily. And these efforts are becoming global: an American court declared the Google Play platform an illegal monopoly, and Google an illegal monopolist in the search engine market; The company may have to force the sale of Android OS and the Chrome browser because of this. This year, new large-scale proceedings are being prepared against Google, Apple and Meta✴.