What happens when Google says “we aren’t going to pay your fines”?

New plan, we are turning off service to your country.

France recently tested out the teeth in GDPR against Google.

“On 21 January 2019, the CNIL’s restricted committee imposed a financial penalty of 50 Million euros against the company GOOGLE LLC, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding the ads personalization.” — source

A win for privacy!

The end of the world’s wild west? Not so much.

Google is a business, it has a responsibility to make money for shareholders. This is its sole responsibility. Google made $110B of revenue in 2017. The 50 Million euro fine is 0.05% of its global revenue. It’s smart business for Google to just pay the fine rather than go to war with the EU over GDPR.

But … what would have happened if France tried to enforce the maximum penalty of 4% in global revenue? If France tried to fine Google $4.4B, would Google pay?

The total Ad spend on all Search Advertising in France is only 2.2B euros.

That’s half the potential fine …

France has been getting uppity of late. It lost a court battle in 2017 against Google for 1.12B euros in back taxes. France convinced Apple to back pay 500 Million euros in back taxes. Now France is trying to…