August 9 2026 - 1:00pm
At first glance, it might seem like authorities are finally holding Big Tech companies accountable for their anti-competitive practices, privacy violations, tax avoidance, deliberate spread of misinformation and other abuses. A New Mexico judge has just ordered Meta to pay nearly $1 billion after it was found liable for failing to protect young people on its platforms. The company must also enact certain new safety features such as limiting the amount of time underage users in the state spend on Facebook and Instagram, and hiding by default the number of “likes” on photos.
State Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who brought forward the lawsuit, has hailed this as a turning point. He said this week that “New Mexico has led the way in the courtroom” and provided a “roadmap” for the thousands of other lawsuits in the US alleging the company prioritized growth over the safety of its users.
The problem, however, is that fines don’t work. Big Tech companies just see fines as the cost of doing business, when and if they are eventually paid. Meta has already said that it will appeal the ruling, further evidence that these organizations have the necessary financial resources to embark on lengthy legal battles. Last year, anonymous messaging board 4chan simply refused to pay a proposed fine from Ofcom enforcing the Digital Safety Act, while earlier this year X challenged a €120 million fine imposed by the European Commission. Swift completion is far from guaranteed: just 0.6% of the total fines issued by the Irish Data Protection Commission between 2020 and the end of October 2024 had been paid as of December 2024.
Regulators like to boast of eventual success stories: for example, in 2023 the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office fined TikTok £12.7 million for misusing children’s data, having originally sought £27 million. Yet, even when enforced cumulatively, these are not meaningful financial deterrents. In 2024, governments around the world fined Big Tech companies a combined $8.2 billion, but this is not enough to meaningfully alter corporate behavior. For context, Apple alone generated almost $99 billion in free cash flow last year, equivalent to more than $11 million an hour. Meta could cover its $1 billion in fines from privacy violations in under two weeks.
Financial penalties alone are not sufficient. Nothing will change unless directors are held criminally responsible for their actions, or lack thereof. One option would be for legislators to change the status of these sites so that they are treated as publishers and therefore can be held liable for user-generated content.
We also need to address Big Tech’s illegal market dominance, and the fact that each of these behemoth companies has effectively become a monopolist that controls a portion of the internet — the world’s most important and irreplaceable infrastructure. Google and Apple dominate smartphones. Google and Meta dominate online advertising and social media entertainment. Amazon dominates online markets. None of them will relinquish their power, influence and — most importantly — profits without more persistent and forceful change. If things continue as they are, these companies will go on interpreting “illegal with a fine” as simply “legal for a price”.
