Big Tech companies needed only 16 days and 21 hours to pay off the over $8.2 billion in fines accumulated throughout 2024 for violating your privacy and competition rules.
This is the shocking finding from Proton, the Swiss privacy firm behind one of the Best VPN and secure email services on the market. The team compared the free cash flow availability of the big four – Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta – with the penalties these companies received throughout the year worldwide.
The results are staggering. In 2024, the fines against Big Tech were indeed the largest ever issued, amounting to more than those in 2023 and 2022 (over $3 billion each year) combined. The real consequences, however, remain miniscule. As Proton puts it, privacy and competition penalties are still “simply a cost of doing business for companies whose revenues are often larger than countries’ GDPs.”
A drop in the Big Tech’s cash flow
For the third consecutive year, Google was the company hit the most with fines in 2024, with the total amount reaching $2.9 billion. Yet, using its free cash flow (the cash a company can generate after unavoidable expenses), it can pay off all its penalties after roughly three weeks of business – 16 days, 21 hours, and 25 minutes to be precise.
Apple followed suit with a total of $2.1 billion to pay off which would take the Big Tech company roughly a week of cash flow. The same goes for Microsoft, with over $1.6 billion in fines.
Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) would need just under two weeks to pay its $1.42 billion penalties. Amazon was one of the least impacted companies, clocking in at just over $57 million. It’s very unlikely Jeff Bezos lost any sleep, though, as a single day’s earnings would erase the penalty entirely.
According to Jurgita Miseviciute, Head of Public Policy at Proton, it’s time regulators start speaking “big tech’s language.”
She said: “You don’t prevent a bank robbery by arming guards with a feather. We need to create an environment where tech companies, no matter where they are founded, can thrive and not be hindered by the biggest players in the market, and strong competition legislation – enforcement – is vital for this. Fines may not be enough, big tech needs to end their anticompetitive practices.”
On almost every occasion, in 2024 Big Tech companies faced penalties either for violating their customers’ privacy or antitrust practices.
Google received this year’s biggest single fine ($2.5 billion) in Europe in October, for instance, for abusing its market dominance to the advantage of its own shopping recommendations in Google search. The company could use its free cash flow to pay this massive penalty entirely in about two weeks.
The smallest fine the firm received amounted to $2,000 issued by South Korea for collecting users’ data without their consent. Google would take only seven seconds to pay this off.
According to Miseviciute, privacy and competition are two sides of the same coin: profiting off 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 would they care about a fine for wrongdoings that are the equivalent to a parking fine for you or I?”
With Big Tech fines still amounting to a small drop in the vast Big Tech’s cash flow, Proton now urges lawmakers across the world to hold Big Tech accountable and to ensure a fair and competitive digital market for all.