"In addition to the fines, the restricted committee ordered the companies to provide Internet users located in France with a means of refusing cookies as simple as the existing means of accepting them, in order to guarantee their freedom of consent, within three months. If they fail to do so, the companies will have to pay a penalty of 100,000 euros per day of delay."
Well, it's ~356 developers they could have paid for that year instead. If only France fines them that might be workable, but there are a lot of other countries in the EU...
if I recall correctly, the fine scales up as time goes on up some (2?) percentage of company revenue. Like most people I would be happier seeing them get a several billion dollar fine right off the bat but so long as it eventually becomes unbearable that's good enough for me.
This is not a GDPR fine, that (as of now - there's some push to change that in the future) can't be passed by France and would have to go through Ireland's regulating agency (since Ireland is the country chosen by Google) which has been not particularly willing to enforce GDPR against the major multinationals.
