- Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta received $7.8 billion in fines by 2025
- Proton estimates that it will only take them 28 days to pay off the debt
- The total value of fines actually fell by 7% compared to 2024
Despite a year of high-profile regulatory crackdowns, a new analysis suggests economic sanctions are not denting the armor of Silicon Valley’s giants.
According to data released today by Proton, Big Tech companies (Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Amazon) collected $7.8 billion in fines for privacy and competition violations by 2025. Yet they were able to pay off all of this debt in just 28 days.
While the $7.8 billion figure sounds astronomical to the average consumer, Proton warns that it represents an insignificant fraction of these companies’ wealth, raising serious questions about whether the current rules are fit for purpose.
Measured against the “free cash flow” of these tech titans, a metric that subtracts unavoidable expenses from revenue, Proton’s data shows it would take just “28 days and 48 minutes to pay the fines if they were all paid simultaneously.”
For users concerned about their digital privacy, the report paints a troubling picture: Despite the headlines, the cost of breaking the rules appears to be little more than a line item in a company’s budget.
“The Cost of Doing Business”
Proton, the company behind one of the best VPN and encrypted email services, claims that the consistently high level of fines proves that financial sanctions do not act as an effective deterrent against unethical behavior.
Leading the list of offenders again was Google (Alphabet), which racked up over $4.2 billion in fines by 2025 alone. But based on Alphabet’s cash flow, the report notes that it can “pay all of its fines in just about three weeks of work.”
Amazon also saw a dramatic increase in legislative action. The e-commerce giant’s penalties skyrocketed by more than 4,000%, jumping from $57 million in 2024 to $2.5 billion in 2025. Still, despite the sticker shock, Amazon was able to clear its regulatory debt in about 86 days of free cash flow.
Romain Digneaux, Public Policy Manager at Proton, suggests that without tougher enforcement, these patterns will continue indefinitely as Big Tech treats fines simply “as a cost of doing business.”
“It’s clear that fines aren’t working. If they were, after years of cracking down on Big Tech with one enforcement action after another, we’d see some kind of change,” he said. “Regulators must have teeth big enough to make Big Tech feel real pain for breaking the rules.”
2025 vs the past: Are we making progress?
When comparing this year’s data to previous years, the enforcement record is mixed. Worryingly, the total value of fines issued actually the fall by just over 7% in 2025 compared to 2024.
While some might interpret this downturn as a sign of improved compliance, the report rejects that notion, citing “many examples of non-compliant behavior” that continued throughout the year. For example, Apple continued to be investigated for its opposition to the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in Europe, despite receiving a €500 million fine in April.
But seen in a longer perspective, the regulatory landscape has intensified. The total fines for 2025 were 160% higher than the total for 2022. This indicates that while regulators are becoming more aggressive over time, fines are still unable to keep pace with the explosive economic growth of the companies they are supposed to police.
As we move further into 2026, the data suggests that unless regulators shift tactics beyond monetary penalties, the cycle of infringement and fines is likely to repeat itself, with user privacy remaining the primary casualty.
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