Hello, Quartz Index readers!
Over the past year or so, the EU has fined Facebook, Amazon, and Apple for various tax and competition transgressions. Besides some bad press, billions of dollars worth of penalties have done little to put the tech giants off their stride.
Sound familiar? Since 2008, big banks have been hit with more than $300 billion in fines for a wide variety of wrongdoing, from selling toxic subprime securities to manipulating markets and skirting sanctions.
While Wall Street giants like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are still making plenty of money, they’re not doing it in quite the same way as before. Revenue from racy trading operations, where much of the activity that triggered the fines took place, is down across the industry.
It’s possible that this is a result of historically low market volatility, but what’s more likely is that the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, a 2,300-page piece of legislation designed to restrain banks in the aftermath of the global financial crisis is having an effect.
A bill proposed this week by a group of US senators would require social media companies to disclose more details about online political advertisements, currently almost entirely unregulated.
There are many bureaucratic hurdles to overcome reining in globe-spanning tech giants, which spend big to lobby against changes. The lesson from recent history is that if regulators want tech firms to change their ways, they should treat them like banks. —Preeti Varathan
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