I believe they can still at any point stop operating in the EU and not pay the fine? How would the EU implement the fine if Meta pulled out? I thought their leverage was just the threat of blocking the service in the EU.
Meta has plenty of EU-based assets which are not liquid enough to just pull out in a matter of months. The EU and national governments would also likely have options under insolvency laws and criminal statutes to freeze some of Meta's assets in the EU if the company made an attempt to pull out to avoid some fines. Of course Meta won't. The EU is a valuable market and even if Meta would stop making any profit (they won't), it can't just leave that market to the competition.
Does this apply to foreign companies? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
If it was a domestic company, of course, assets could just be seized to pay the fine plus whatever non payment penalty. Is there a criminal charge after asset seizure? Or does this just never happen because there is no incentive to do it domestically?
Not a lawyer, but shutting down a subsidiary to avoid overwhelming fines is de facto messing with the insolvency laws, isn't it? At least in Germany that is a criminal offense for which the executives of the (parent) company are ultimately liable.
Plus, Meta actually is a domestic company in the E.U. They handle all their E.U. business through an Irish subsidiary (which is why the Irish data protection agency is responsible for all of this) and they also have subsidiaries to manage political and customer relations in many other E.U. countries, as well as presumably data centers, etc. Removing all of this would be a big project and would give government agencies plenty of time to seize assets. These assets could also include non-tangibles, i.e. the .de/.fr domains for their websites.
That's exactly what they should've done to not break the law while there was no legal basis for what they were doing.
They didn't. Now they suffer the consequences for breaking the law.