A prime European Union information privacy regulator on Wednesday defended a choice to hit Meta with a record-setting 1.2 billion euro ($1.3 billion) fine, saying that she had to enforce the regulation primarily based on present rules.

Helen Dixon, the Data Protection Commissioner for Ireland — the essential regulator for Meta and several other different massive U.S. tech corporations — stated that the watchdog took the determination to account for the present EU-U.S. information transfers framework that was in place.

“I have to enforce the regulation as it’s at the time,” Dixon stated Wednesday in an interview with CNBC’s “Worldwide Exchange.”

Meta on Monday was fined a report 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) by the Irish Data Protection Commission for breaching the EU’s robust guidelines on information privacy, often known as the General Data Protection Regulation.

GDPR is a landmark information safety regulation that governs companies in the bloc. It got here into impact in May 2018. Since then, EU privacy regulators have hit main U.S. tech corporations with some eye-watering fines, together with an $887 million on Amazon in Luxembourg and a $267 million fine on WhatsApp in Ireland. Meta’s fine of Monday is the largest to date.

Several mechanisms to legally switch private information between the U.S. and the EU have been contested. The newest such iteration, Privacy Shield, was struck down by the European Court of Justice, the EU’s prime court docket, in 2020.

The Irish Data Protection Commission that oversees Meta operations in the EU alleged the firm infringed the bloc’s GDPR when it continued to ship the private information of European residents to the U.S regardless of the 2020 European court docket ruling.

Ireland’s regulator additionally pronounced that Meta was not allowed to proceed sharing information on Europeans with the U.S., in a probably business-crippling determination that would pressure the agency to transfer all of its storage and processing of Europeans’ information regionally in the EU.

EU and U.S. officers have been making an attempt to agree a framework to change Privacy Shield, and there are reviews that an alternative to the mechanism may very well be greenlit by the summer season. According to Meta, this might have allowed the firm to proceed sharing information on EU residents with its amenities in the U.S. as regular.

Asked why the regulator selected to take its determination now, when there may be extra regulation to come down the line, Dixon stated, “The level is, it nonetheless hasn’t come into impact.”

She added, “This new settlement, referred to as the European Data Privacy Framework, it is nonetheless pending. And at the time I concluded my investigation final summer season, it nonetheless wasn’t actually on the horizon. So I had to enforce the regulation as it’s at the time.”

Before Monday, Meta was most not too long ago struck with a $414 million fine for separate GDPR breaches on its WhatsApp and Instagram apps in January. The Monday Meta fine is the largest to date since the EU’s GDPR got here into pressure. Meta says it plans to enchantment the determination and the fine.

– CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report