7 ms·

It is indexed, just not to the damages, but to the revenue of the guilty party. Other countries in the EU do this as well, even in personal matters. For instan

by mfoy_ 8y ago

It is indexed, just not to the damages, but to the revenue of the guilty party. Other countries in the EU do this as well, even in personal matters. For instance, a speeding ticket is based off a percentage of your annual income. Why? Because if you make $200k a year, a $50 fine isn't a big deal, at all, but if you barely scrape by, $50 could break your budget for the month.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> Why? Because if you make $200k a year, a $50 fine isn't a big deal, at all, but if you barely scrape by, $50 could break your budget for the month. That makes no sense. If you're stealing $50 then a $150 fine is a deterrent even if you're a billionaire, because the expected value if you're caught is -$100, which has nothing at all to do with how much money you have. And if that caused the billionaire to not care, that's great. If I got $150 every time someone stole $50 from me and that didn't deter them, I'd start researching how to get them to steal more money from me because it's so profitable to me. If they're willing to pay that much more than something costs, at that point you're just selling it to them and deterrence is not desired because the transaction is apparently net positive to both parties. Moreover, it seems that you're suggesting that someone with $0 income and $0 assets then should have a <=$50 fine because it's all they can afford? That's the thing that really wouldn't serve as a deterrent, in a problematic, net negative consequences sort of way.
- lovetox 8y ago
  You are missing the point. Google does not just steal money which we get back with a fine and thats it. It drives competitors out of the market and that causes damage to the economy and is against the interests of the population where they do business. They should make the Managers personally liable. If you think about it 1.5 Billions is laughable for a company like Google, its only money which they have plenty from. Nothing will change.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > Google does not just steal money which we get back with a fine and thats it. > It drives competitors out of the market and that causes damage to the economy and is against the interests of the population where they do business. That's the same thing. The harm can be measured in money and a proportional fine imposed. That is no argument for the fine to be proportional to total revenue rather than having any relationship to the harm itself. > They should make the Managers personally liable. At which point the "manager" is compensated by the company or its liability insurance for whatever retribution the government takes on them as an individual, and it's still the company paying regardless. > If you think about it 1.5 Billions is laughable for a company like Google, its only money which they have plenty from. Nothing will change. I don't know about that. In the US the tech companies used to mostly ignore Washington, until it stopped ignoring them. Now they're some of the biggest spenders on lobbying. That would take a different form in Europe because the laws are different, but if you're not expecting this to lead to some variant of "money buys influence" you're likely in for a surprise. So it will likely change that at least. Which is another reason proportionality is important. If preventing a $1M fine is worth spending $1M on lobbying then preventing a series of multi-billion dollar fines is worth...
  - treis 8y ago
    >If you think about it 1.5 Billions is laughable for a company like Google, its only money which they have plenty from. Nothing will change. Just because they have a lot of money doesn't mean they are okay with losing a bunch. As long as the fine amount, adjusting for the probability of the fine, is higher than benefit Google attains by breaking the law it will act as a deterrence.
- hellllllllooo 8y ago
  > If you're stealing $50 then a $150 fine is a deterrent even if you're a billionaire, because the expected value if you're caught is -$100, which has nothing at all to do with how much money you have. This is not true if you see $50 and $150 dollars as basically the same amount when compared to your overall wealth. Would you care about a 2 cent fine for overrunning you time on a 1 cent parking space?
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > This is not true if you see $50 and $150 dollars as basically the same amount when compared to your overall wealth. Would you care about a 2 cent fine for overrunning you time on a 1 cent parking space? At which point you can be happy that the rich person is voluntarily paying the 3 cent fine instead of the 1 cent parking fee. If you made it a $1000 fine vs. a 1 cent parking fee then they would pay the parking fee, but how is that actually better? You convinced them to spend more of their time keeping track of how long they had before having to put money in the meter and as a result you ended up with less money. Net loss to everyone. Meanwhile now you're creating a bunch of perverse incentives for rich people to register their cars in someone else's name or waste thousands of man hours on both sides to contest an ordinary parking fine, and creating a bunch of perverse incentives for governments to pass vague, misleading, counterintuitive or impossible to comply with laws so they can jump out of the bushes and impose massive fines on anyone who walks by with money in their pocket.
    - andrepd 8y ago
      >At which point you can be happy that the rich person is voluntarily paying the 3 cent fine instead of the 1 cent parking fee. No, because the issue here is not like a fee, it's about breaking the law and how you should be punished for it in order for it to deter you. A more apt comparison would be "you can be happy that the a rich person is voluntarily paying 500$ to park on top of a crosswalk. In this case you want to deter the person from doing something that harms others, not just to make them pay for it, which in this case means either a fine indexed to income or jail time, so it hurts you even if you are a billionaire.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- UnFleshedOne 8y ago
  There is an argument for indexing fines to income or net worth for people too (in addition to severity of the crime) -- if you want to stop a behavior, for example speeding, it doesn't make sense to set the fine equal for everybody unless wealth distribution in society is remarkably flat, so the marginal value of lost money is similar for everybody. If you don't index for ability to pay you just create a separate set of laws for different classes of people. This is basically the same argument as for progressive taxation.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > There is an argument for indexing fines to income or net worth for people too (in addition to severity of the crime) -- if you want to stop a behavior, for example speeding, it doesn't make sense to set the fine equal for everybody unless wealth distribution in society is remarkably flat, so the marginal value of lost money is similar for everybody. If you don't index for ability to pay you just create a separate set of laws for different classes of people. The issue is that stopping the behavior is committing to a bad abstraction. Cars can kill people even below the speed limit. If you drive faster, the probability goes up. That is an externality, because you put others in danger in addition to yourself, regardless of which speed it is. In principle what you ought to do is price the externality. You create some amount of risk by driving a mile at 50MPH, so you're charged a proportional amount for that. The risk created by driving at 70MPH is more, so the charge should be higher, proportional to the higher risk. But that would require monitoring the speed that every car drives every mile and billing for it. Until recently that wasn't even plausible and even now it would be a huge privacy invasion. So instead we settle on choosing some speed, ignoring the cost of anyone driving slower than that even if its true cost is non-zero, and whacking anyone who drives faster with a disproportionate fine to compensate for most instances going undetected. Committing to deterring all speeding at any cost is completely ignoring why we're doing this to begin with. We don't need to eliminate all risk -- that would imply eliminating all cars and other vehicles and in practice isn't possible even then. What we need is to throttle the risk so that it remains at a manageable level. Which is exactly what pricing it does. That's true whether you're doing meticulous risk accounting or using blunt stochastic methods like speeding fines. And when you price something, rich people buy more of it because they have more money. If the price you've assigned to the risk is actually proportional to the cost being imposed by taking it, you really don't need to stop them. Just let them pay for the risk in money. Then use the money to pay for safety improvements or compensate victims or whatever you like -- if the amount they're paying is properly proportional to the risk then you come out better off this way than by actually deterring them. > This is basically the same argument as for progressive taxation. The argument for progressive taxation is that we're not trying to discourage behavior and the rich are better able to pay, so charging them more will have less detrimental effect because it will have a lower impact on their consumption. It's more about taxing the poor less than taxing the rich more.
- JabavuAdams 8y ago
  What happens to your scenario if the fine is for murder, not theft? What happens if the excess speeding results in measurable excess deaths? Let's keep it real.
jessriedel 8y ago
First, the vast majority of the world does not use the day-fine system. But more importantly, it makes no sense to index corporate fines to a firm's revenue because corporations can be split/combined (unlike people). Indexing fines to firm size would lead to market distortions, especially in the case when those fines are a significant fraction of total revenue.
- chocolatebunny 8y ago
  At this point it might actually make sense for Google to create a separate European entity so they won't get fined so heavily all the time in the EU. I guess they'd have to see how much of a benefit that would be relative to the amount of taxes they would save by being in Ireland (I'm not sure if that's still a thing).
  - raquo 8y ago
    The fine is already based on Google's European (not global) ad revenue as someone else quoted in the comments.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    Google has already started the process of splitting to a Google EEA. They sent notices recently about a transfer of data custodianship to GSuite customers.
Aunche 8y ago
Google isn't a single person. They're already more likely violate some laws and regulations just because they're so big. You can't double dip by treating every small infraction like it's a huge company-wide problem.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  Too Big To Be Accountable ??????
  - Aunche 8y ago
    Since when does accountable mean being fined over $1 billion? It is beyond absurd. If Waymo gets a speeding ticket in Europe, should it also be for $1 billion? At least the speed limit is a clearly defined rule. Selectively enforcing an arbitrary definition of "anticompetitive" is not.

by mfoy_ 8y ago

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> Why? Because if you make $200k a year, a $50 fine isn't a big deal, at all, but if you barely scrape by, $50 could break your budget for the month. That makes no sense. If you're stealing $50 then a $150 fine is a deterrent even if you're a billionaire, because the expected value if you're caught is -$100, which has nothing at all to do with how much money you have. And if that caused the billionaire to not care, that's great. If I got $150 every time someone stole $50 from me and that didn't deter them, I'd start researching how to get them to steal more money from me because it's so profitable to me. If they're willing to pay that much more than something costs, at that point you're just selling it to them and deterrence is not desired because the transaction is apparently net positive to both parties. Moreover, it seems that you're suggesting that someone with $0 income and $0 assets then should have a <=$50 fine because it's all they can afford? That's the thing that really wouldn't serve as a deterrent, in a problematic, net negative consequences sort of way.

lovetox 8y ago
You are missing the point. Google does not just steal money which we get back with a fine and thats it. It drives competitors out of the market and that causes damage to the economy and is against the interests of the population where they do business. They should make the Managers personally liable. If you think about it 1.5 Billions is laughable for a company like Google, its only money which they have plenty from. Nothing will change.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > Google does not just steal money which we get back with a fine and thats it. > It drives competitors out of the market and that causes damage to the economy and is against the interests of the population where they do business. That's the same thing. The harm can be measured in money and a proportional fine imposed. That is no argument for the fine to be proportional to total revenue rather than having any relationship to the harm itself. > They should make the Managers personally liable. At which point the "manager" is compensated by the company or its liability insurance for whatever retribution the government takes on them as an individual, and it's still the company paying regardless. > If you think about it 1.5 Billions is laughable for a company like Google, its only money which they have plenty from. Nothing will change. I don't know about that. In the US the tech companies used to mostly ignore Washington, until it stopped ignoring them. Now they're some of the biggest spenders on lobbying. That would take a different form in Europe because the laws are different, but if you're not expecting this to lead to some variant of "money buys influence" you're likely in for a surprise. So it will likely change that at least. Which is another reason proportionality is important. If preventing a $1M fine is worth spending $1M on lobbying then preventing a series of multi-billion dollar fines is worth...
- treis 8y ago
  >If you think about it 1.5 Billions is laughable for a company like Google, its only money which they have plenty from. Nothing will change. Just because they have a lot of money doesn't mean they are okay with losing a bunch. As long as the fine amount, adjusting for the probability of the fine, is higher than benefit Google attains by breaking the law it will act as a deterrence.
hellllllllooo 8y ago
> If you're stealing $50 then a $150 fine is a deterrent even if you're a billionaire, because the expected value if you're caught is -$100, which has nothing at all to do with how much money you have. This is not true if you see $50 and $150 dollars as basically the same amount when compared to your overall wealth. Would you care about a 2 cent fine for overrunning you time on a 1 cent parking space?
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > This is not true if you see $50 and $150 dollars as basically the same amount when compared to your overall wealth. Would you care about a 2 cent fine for overrunning you time on a 1 cent parking space? At which point you can be happy that the rich person is voluntarily paying the 3 cent fine instead of the 1 cent parking fee. If you made it a $1000 fine vs. a 1 cent parking fee then they would pay the parking fee, but how is that actually better? You convinced them to spend more of their time keeping track of how long they had before having to put money in the meter and as a result you ended up with less money. Net loss to everyone. Meanwhile now you're creating a bunch of perverse incentives for rich people to register their cars in someone else's name or waste thousands of man hours on both sides to contest an ordinary parking fine, and creating a bunch of perverse incentives for governments to pass vague, misleading, counterintuitive or impossible to comply with laws so they can jump out of the bushes and impose massive fines on anyone who walks by with money in their pocket.
  - andrepd 8y ago
    >At which point you can be happy that the rich person is voluntarily paying the 3 cent fine instead of the 1 cent parking fee. No, because the issue here is not like a fee, it's about breaking the law and how you should be punished for it in order for it to deter you. A more apt comparison would be "you can be happy that the a rich person is voluntarily paying 500$ to park on top of a crosswalk. In this case you want to deter the person from doing something that harms others, not just to make them pay for it, which in this case means either a fine indexed to income or jail time, so it hurts you even if you are a billionaire.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
UnFleshedOne 8y ago
There is an argument for indexing fines to income or net worth for people too (in addition to severity of the crime) -- if you want to stop a behavior, for example speeding, it doesn't make sense to set the fine equal for everybody unless wealth distribution in society is remarkably flat, so the marginal value of lost money is similar for everybody. If you don't index for ability to pay you just create a separate set of laws for different classes of people. This is basically the same argument as for progressive taxation.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > There is an argument for indexing fines to income or net worth for people too (in addition to severity of the crime) -- if you want to stop a behavior, for example speeding, it doesn't make sense to set the fine equal for everybody unless wealth distribution in society is remarkably flat, so the marginal value of lost money is similar for everybody. If you don't index for ability to pay you just create a separate set of laws for different classes of people. The issue is that stopping the behavior is committing to a bad abstraction. Cars can kill people even below the speed limit. If you drive faster, the probability goes up. That is an externality, because you put others in danger in addition to yourself, regardless of which speed it is. In principle what you ought to do is price the externality. You create some amount of risk by driving a mile at 50MPH, so you're charged a proportional amount for that. The risk created by driving at 70MPH is more, so the charge should be higher, proportional to the higher risk. But that would require monitoring the speed that every car drives every mile and billing for it. Until recently that wasn't even plausible and even now it would be a huge privacy invasion. So instead we settle on choosing some speed, ignoring the cost of anyone driving slower than that even if its true cost is non-zero, and whacking anyone who drives faster with a disproportionate fine to compensate for most instances going undetected. Committing to deterring all speeding at any cost is completely ignoring why we're doing this to begin with. We don't need to eliminate all risk -- that would imply eliminating all cars and other vehicles and in practice isn't possible even then. What we need is to throttle the risk so that it remains at a manageable level. Which is exactly what pricing it does. That's true whether you're doing meticulous risk accounting or using blunt stochastic methods like speeding fines. And when you price something, rich people buy more of it because they have more money. If the price you've assigned to the risk is actually proportional to the cost being imposed by taking it, you really don't need to stop them. Just let them pay for the risk in money. Then use the money to pay for safety improvements or compensate victims or whatever you like -- if the amount they're paying is properly proportional to the risk then you come out better off this way than by actually deterring them. > This is basically the same argument as for progressive taxation. The argument for progressive taxation is that we're not trying to discourage behavior and the rich are better able to pay, so charging them more will have less detrimental effect because it will have a lower impact on their consumption. It's more about taxing the poor less than taxing the rich more.
JabavuAdams 8y ago
What happens to your scenario if the fine is for murder, not theft? What happens if the excess speeding results in measurable excess deaths? Let's keep it real.

jessriedel 8y ago

First, the vast majority of the world does not use the day-fine system. But more importantly, it makes no sense to index corporate fines to a firm's revenue because corporations can be split/combined (unlike people). Indexing fines to firm size would lead to market distortions, especially in the case when those fines are a significant fraction of total revenue.

chocolatebunny 8y ago
At this point it might actually make sense for Google to create a separate European entity so they won't get fined so heavily all the time in the EU. I guess they'd have to see how much of a benefit that would be relative to the amount of taxes they would save by being in Ireland (I'm not sure if that's still a thing).
- raquo 8y ago
  The fine is already based on Google's European (not global) ad revenue as someone else quoted in the comments.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  Google has already started the process of splitting to a Google EEA. They sent notices recently about a transfer of data custodianship to GSuite customers.

Aunche 8y ago

Google isn't a single person. They're already more likely violate some laws and regulations just because they're so big. You can't double dip by treating every small infraction like it's a huge company-wide problem.

mfoy_ 8y ago
Too Big To Be Accountable ??????
- Aunche 8y ago
  Since when does accountable mean being fined over $1 billion? It is beyond absurd. If Waymo gets a speeding ticket in Europe, should it also be for $1 billion? At least the speed limit is a clearly defined rule. Selectively enforcing an arbitrary definition of "anticompetitive" is not.