A high European Union information privateness regulator on Wednesday defended a call to hit Meta with a record-setting 1.2 billion euro ($1.3 billion) high quality, saying that she needed to implement the legislation based mostly on present rules.

Helen Dixon, the Knowledge Safety Commissioner for Eire — the principle regulator for Meta and several other different large U.S. tech firms — mentioned that the watchdog took the choice to account for the present EU-U.S. information transfers framework that was in place.

“I’ve to implement the legislation as it’s on the time,” Dixon mentioned Wednesday in an interview with CNBC’s “Worldwide Change.”

Meta on Monday was fined a file 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) by the Irish Knowledge Safety Fee for breaching the EU’s robust guidelines on information privateness, often called the Basic Knowledge Safety Regulation.

GDPR is a landmark information safety regulation that governs companies within the bloc. It got here into impact in Might 2018. Since then, EU privateness regulators have hit main U.S. tech firms with some eye-watering fines, together with an $887 million on Amazon in Luxembourg and a $267 million high quality on WhatsApp in Eire. Meta’s high quality of Monday is the most important so far.

A number of mechanisms to legally switch private information between the U.S. and the EU have been contested. The newest such iteration, Privateness Protect, was struck down by the European Courtroom of Justice, the EU’s high court docket, in 2020.

The Irish Knowledge Safety Fee that oversees Meta operations within the EU alleged the corporate infringed the bloc’s GDPR when it continued to ship the private information of European residents to the usdespite the 2020 European court docket ruling.

Eire’s regulator additionally pronounced that Meta was not allowed to proceed sharing information on Europeans with the U.S., in a doubtlessly business-crippling determination that might drive the agency to maneuver all of its storage and processing of Europeans’ information regionally within the EU.

EU and U.S. officers have been trying to agree a framework to exchange Privateness Protect, and there are experiences that an alternative to the mechanism might be greenlit by the summer time. In line with Meta, this is able to have allowed the corporate to proceed sharing information on EU residents with its services within the U.S. as regular.

Requested why the regulator selected to take its determination now, when there’s extra regulation to come back down the road, Dixon mentioned, “The purpose is, it nonetheless hasn’t come into impact.”

She added, “This new settlement, known as the European Knowledge Privateness Framework, it is nonetheless pending. And on the time I concluded my investigation final summer time, it nonetheless wasn’t actually on the horizon. So I needed to implement the legislation as it’s on the time.”

Earlier than Monday, Meta was most lately struck with a $414 million high quality for separate GDPR breaches on its WhatsApp and Instagram apps in January. The Monday Meta high quality is the most important so far because the EU’s GDPR got here into drive. Meta says it plans to attraction the choice and the high quality.

– CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report