- Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta received $7.8 billion in fines in 2025
- Proton estimates it would only take them 28 days to repay the debt.
- The total amount of fines has in fact decreased by 7% compared to 2024
Despite a year of high-profile regulatory crackdowns, a new analysis suggests that financial sanctions are failing to dent the armor of Silicon Valley giants.
According to data released today by Proton, big tech companies (Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Amazon) have racked up $7.8 billion in fines for privacy and competition violations in 2025. Yet they could pay off all of that debt in just 28 days.
Although the $7.8 billion figure seems astronomical to the average consumer, Proton warns that it represents a negligible fraction of these companies’ wealth, raising serious questions about the adequacy of current regulations.
Compared to these tech titans’ “free cash flow,” a metric that subtracts unavoidable expenses from revenue, Proton’s data shows it would take just “28 days and 48 minutes to pay the fines if they were all paid simultaneously.”
For users concerned about their digital privacy, the report paints a worrying picture: Despite the headlines, the cost of breaking the rules appears to be just a line item in a company’s budget.
The “cost of doing business”
Proton, the company behind one of the best VPN and encrypted messaging services, says the consistently high level of fines proves that financial penalties do not act as an effective deterrent against unethical behavior.
Once again, at the top of the list of offenders Google (Alphabet), which has racked up more than $4.2 billion in fines in 2025 alone. However, based on Alphabet’s cash flow, the report says it can “pay all of its penalties in just about three weeks.”
Amazon We have also seen a dramatic increase in regulatory measures. The e-commerce giant’s penalties climbed more than 4,000%, from $57 million in 2024 to $2.5 billion in 2025. Yet despite the sticker shock, Amazon was able to wipe out its regulatory debt in about 86 days of free cash flow.
Romain Digneaux, head of public policy at Proton, suggests that without stronger enforcement, these patterns will continue indefinitely, as big tech treats fines simply “as a cost of doing business.”
“Clearly, fines aren’t working. If they were, after years of cracking down on Big Tech with one enforcement measure after another, we would see some sort of change,” he said. “Regulators need to have powers great enough that big tech feels real pain for breaking the rules.”
2025 vs the past: are we making progress?
When comparing this year’s data to previous years, the trajectory of law enforcement is mixed. It is worrying to note that the total value of fines imposed diminished by a little more than 7% in 2025 compared to 2024.
While some might interpret this decline as a sign of improved compliance, the report rejects that notion, citing “numerous examples of noncompliant behavior” that continued throughout the year. For example, Apple continued to face scrutiny for its resistance to the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in Europe, despite being fined €500 million in April.
However, in the longer term, the regulatory landscape has intensified. The total fines for 2025 were 160% higher than the total for 2022. This indicates that even as regulators become more aggressive over time, fines still fail to keep pace with the explosive financial growth of the companies they are supposed to police.
As we move toward 2026, data suggests that unless regulators change tactics beyond monetary penalties, the cycle of violations and fines is likely to repeat itself, with user privacy remaining the main casualty.
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