> $529bn would just not work. If the fine structure's purpose is to prevent companies from doing extremely illegal things. Then it seems to work just fine. Fac

> $529bn would just not work. If the fine structure's purpose is to prevent companies from doing extremely illegal things. Then it seems to work just fine. Facebook would be unable to repeat this mistake. It's not like there are such things as corporate death sentences in much of the world. So there does need to be a mechanism to ensure that a company that repeatedly flagrantly violates the law is stopped from doing so eventually. Excessive fines are a way to do that, to make it so economically non-viable that it is avoided. Now again, one can argue whether this violation is worthy of that. But on the face of it there is no reason why feasibility of payment is necessary for deciding the amount of a fine. Capitalism has problems with pricing external costs to society. The more common example being things like pollution and climate change (something ironically that Australia is particularity bad at). The price for privacy violations here might be a bit high, but it is an externality worth pricing. The amount of money the government will need to spend fighting identity theft in response to this is just the first order effect. Economic damage from both the identity theft and loss of trust. Mental health damage done from the identity theft and leaked data being used. According to the article the government of Australia prices that at 1,700,000 per person. Which actually sounds like a reasonable amount once one considers paying police to track down thieves, prosecution, jail time, the potential for social services to have to help that person while their life is put back together, and so on. It's the multiplication that screwed them here. That's the part that might not track quite correctly.