Ah. "Large" dot-coms. Well, I think your intuition tells you that "large" dot-coms are also capable of incurring public liability that is not held in check by

Ah. "Large" dot-coms. Well, I think your intuition tells you that "large" dot-coms are also capable of incurring public liability that is not held in check by their nominal liability. I'd argue that it's improbable that Apple or Google could do damage to the public on quite the scale that BP or Goldman-Sachs or Enron managed, but you could well be right. But I think you really need to think about regulating risk, not classes of company - except insofar as classes of companies are in fact associated with certain categories of risk. Apple will not be causing a vast oil spill. Microsoft - well, Microsoft might be capable of destroying the global financial markets, but probably not as directly as AIG. I consider the category of "dot-com" to be entirely orthogonal to this question. It's the risk, not the company. And moreover, it's instances where the risk to the public is far larger than the risk (or cost) to the company in the worst case. That's where regulation has to adjust the balance. For instance, Google could accidentally deny email to about 176 million people at once, and that could arguably cause some damage. They could choose to stop offering free email with no notice. You could argue that this would cause them enough ill will that they wouldn't do it - but that argument clearly doesn't work for BP or the financial giants. So you might have an argument there.