It's time that courts come to terms with the amount of money companies now control. A 600k fine is quite large if an individual. For a large corp, it's a rounding error. If a court wants to signal they are unhappy with the behavior of a corp, then they really need to adjust their punishment. These corps have money that rival nation states, and should be treated as such.
Bear in mind this is for a single violation, not a widespread noncompliance issue. Considering the number of RTBF complaints Google fields (I believe it's north of a million by now), a large number of violations would ratchet up the costs significantly.
This is probably a good example of RTBF working as intended. For as loud as Google was opposing to it, they've done, on average, a reasonably good job complying with it (people who know me should know I do not give Google more credit than they deserve, ever), and penalties like this for individual failures seem reasonable for the impact on the individuals who file them.
RTBF for better or worse places the burden of deciding how to respond to a request on Google, not an independent judiciary. That cuts down a lot of red tape, but I think it also means the appeals process can't be too harsh on the penalty here: The trial court usually isn't penalized for being overturned on appeal.
And also a first violation of this kind for this court. A second one would likely not pass unnoticed. A case here in NL where a hospital first got warned then got fined a small amount and then got fined a - for that hospital - massive amount certainly put them on notice. That's an error that will not be repeated a fourth time.
