Big Tech companies needed only 16 days and 21 hours to pay the over $8.2 billion in fines accumulated through 2024 for violating your privacy and competition rules.
This is the shocking discovery from Proton, the Swiss privacy company behind one of the best VPN and secure email services on the market. The team compared the availability of free cash flow for the big four – Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta – with the sanctions these companies received during the year worldwide.
The results are staggering. In fact, the 2024 fines against Big Tech were the largest ever issued, amounting to more than the 2023 and 2022 fines (over $3 billion each year) combined. However, the real consequences are still small. As Proton puts it, privacy and competition penalties are still “simply a cost of doing business for companies whose revenues are often greater than the GDP of countries.”
A decline in Big Tech’s cash flow
For the third year in a row, Google the company was hit the hardest with fines in 2024, when the total amount reached 2.9 billion dollars. Yet by using its free cash flow (the cash that a company can generate after inevitable expenses), it can pay all its fines after approx. three weeks of work – 16 days, 21 hours and 25 minutes to be exact.
Apple followed suit in everything 2.1 billion dollars to pay off, which would take the Big Tech company about a week of cash flow. The same applies to Microsoftwith over 1.6 billion dollars in fines.
Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) would need just under two weeks to pay its share 1.42 billion dollars fines. Amazon was one of the least affected companies, clocking in at just over 57 million dollars. However, it is highly unlikely that Jeff Bezos lost any sleep as a single day’s earnings would erase the penalty entirely.
According to Jurgita Miseviciute, head of public policy at Proton, it’s time for regulators to start speaking “the language of big tech.”
She said: “You don’t prevent a bank robbery by arming guards with a quill. We need to create an environment where technology companies, wherever they are founded, can thrive and not be hindered by the biggest players in the market, and strong competition law – enforcement – is critical to this. Fines may not be enough, big tech must stop their anti-competitive practices.”
At almost every opportunity in 2024, Big Tech companies faced sanctions either for violating their customers’ privacy or antitrust practices.
Google received the largest single fine of the year ($2.5 billion) in Europe in October, for example, for abusing its market dominance in favor of its own shopping recommendations in Google search. The company was able to use its free cash flow to pay this massive fine in full in about two weeks.
The smallest fine the company received was $2,000 issued by South Korea for collecting users’ data without their consent. Google would only take seven seconds to pay this out.
According to Miseviciute, privacy and competition are two sides of the same coin: taking advantage of people’s most valuable asset – their personal data – by offering ‘free’ services in exchange.
She said: “This exploitative business model benefits no one but Big Tech and erodes both privacy and choice. But why should they care about a misdemeanor fine equivalent to a parking ticket for you or me?”
With Big Tech fines still amounting to a small drop in Big Tech’s huge cash flow, Proton is now calling on lawmakers around the world to hold Big Tech accountable and ensure a fair and competitive digital market for all.
