Should privacy fines be tied to a technology company’s global revenue?

A privacy violation by one product should not be priced against revenue from businesses that had nothing to do with it. When Luxembourg fined Amazon 746 million euros in 2021, the figure was scaled to global turnover, which meant money from cloud computing, logistics, and retail on other continents all fed a penalty for targeted advertising practices. The GDPR enforcement tracker records it among the largest fines ever issued. That is not proportionality, it is guilt by conglomerate. A company organized as ten separate firms would pay a tenth of what an integrated one pays for the identical misconduct. Tying fines to worldwide revenue punishes corporate structure instead of the violation, and it hands regulators a number designed to impress journalists rather than fit the harm. GDPR enforcement tracker