Publicly available information reveals that Apple was fined a total of $851 million last year for privacy and antitrust violations, down from $2.1B in 2024.
The data was collated by Proton, which reports that it would have taken the iPhone maker just three days, three hours and 28 minutes to pay off the total …
Proton updated its annual Tech Fines Tracker, revealing that Apple was twice fined for abusing its dominant position to disadvantage competitors and twice fined for violating privacy laws.
| Apple | February | $3.2M | South Korea –for using data illegally obtained without users’ consent |
| Apple | March | $162M | France – for violating privacy laws |
| Apple | April | $571M | EU – for breaching DMA rules for app stores |
| Apple | December | $115M | Italy – for abusing its dominant App Store position |
This contrasts with Google being fined a total of $4.2 billion, Amazon $2.5 billion, and Meta $228 million.
However, the company argues that the sums are completely inadequate given the size of these businesses.
The $7.8 billion in fines issued to Big Tech over the course of 2025 – a huge sum on paper – represents just a little under a month’s revenue for these companies, raising the question of whether regulators’ reliance on fines is an effective form of enforcement. When compared to the free cash flow (which takes revenue and subtracts some unavoidable expenses) of the tech giants, it would take just 28 days and 48 minutes to pay off the fines if they were all paid off concurrently.
It noted that Apple’s free cash flow would pay off all four of the fines in just a few days: 3D 3H 28M. Romain Digneaux, Proton’s public policy manager, said:
Clearly, fines are not working. If they were, after years of slapping down Big Tech with one enforcement action after another we’d see some sort of change. But instead, Big Tech is […] simply treating the fines as a cost of doing business, something expected and baked into company budgets. Regulators must be given teeth big enough to make Big Tech feel some real pain for breaking the rules. We need actual change, not just press releases […]
Numerous examples of non-compliant behavior continued in 2025, for example with Apple still blatantly refusing to comply with its DMA obligations despite being fined for 500 million euros back in April.
9to5Mac’s Take
It should be noted that EU regulators in particular already have the power to levy much higher fines than they have done to date. For privacy breaches, for example, the EU can fine a company up to 6% of its total annual global revenue.
However, Proton’s broader point is well made. While the fines levied for breaching competition and privacy laws are comparatively low, there is little incentive for companies of these sizes to change their behaviours.
Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash
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