Sorry, I thought HN would naturally assume the right answer immediately. I could have commented "clue: it's a round number".
They haven't paid any of it. Probably never will, perhaps in exchange for some job creation. Never take these kinds of announcement of fines at face value when you read them.
It is in the appeals process. No pronouncement yet that it will actually be enforced that I can find. (Sorry for LN Paywall, but you get the gist of it).
Well, I mean, yeah, it's not a bill of attainder, and they get to appeal. For something like this, a company will _always_ appeal, even if they are sure they cannot win the appeal, because then they get to hold onto a billion dollars for an extra year or so, and the value of that is far greater than any legal fees they're likely to incur.
> Probably never will, perhaps in exchange for some job creation
That bit I'd be more dubious on. Ireland's courts are very independent (sometimes to the point of comedy, for instance see the incident a decade ago where the courts found that the legal mechanism used to ban most drugs was invalid: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/10/irish-es-are-s... , leading to ecstasy, ketamine etc becoming legal for a day). It's not a US-style highly-politicised court system, and even if the government wanted to influence the eventual outcome, it doesn't really have levers to do so.
They're cranking through the process, but, like, unless the GDPR is found to be _unconstitutional_ (seems implausible, given the enormous amount of constitutional scrutiny that EU law has already had), they're probably looking at paying once the process comes to an end.
