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TOTs.... An where have thesse 'fines' resulted in anything beneficial to human society. THe title SHOULD read: Google forced to fund N schools in Germany f

TOTs.... An where have thesse 'fines' resulted in anything beneficial to human society. THe title *SHOULD* read: Google forced to fund N schools in Germany for fucking up. But no, In ALL of any of these 'fine-ings' can we have a document of where the fines were applied and what they accomplished?

caymanjim 5y ago
The fines shouldn't be tied to anything. The point of fines is to punish bad behavior. The fine is the incentive to change behavior. I don't want fines being tied to specific rewards for a subset of society or a special interest. Once you start doing that, the incentives are broken. The benefit to society is that Google changes their behavior to avoid being fined again. The money should go into general government funding, not to "schools" or any other specific thing.
- andruby 5y ago
  I'm wondering what the effect would be if the money from the fines is burned (destroyed). The company would still feel the same incentive. For the government on the other hand, it removes the incentive to fine for one's own gain. I like that it would remove this conflict of interest. By removing the money, it's essentially very slightly reducing inflation.
  - niyikiza 5y ago
    Actually that can be quite an equitable way of distributing the fines (to all people holding the currency in question).
    - caymanjim 5y ago
      While in theory this sounds nice, in practice it means everyone gets nothing. It's a rare case where I'd rather see the government get money. A comparable scenario is a class-action lawsuit; a company might lose a billion dollar class action lawsuit, but what that means is a third goes to lawyers, a third goes to administrative overhead, and the remaining third is distributed to the plaintiffs as a bunch of checks for 50 cents a piece (and then they're taxed on it!). I'd rather the government get one big check.
      - samstave 5y ago
        Hmmm... >>While in theory this sounds nice, in practice it means everyone gets nothing. im trying to find out where anyone got something?
- easytiger 5y ago
  Legislation is often changed so as to target big companies in the industry du jour. Just look at how tenuous many of the prosecutions in France of Google are. They aren't aimed at market fairness even remotely, but to extract wealth to the state. It's particularly noticeable because the regulations selectively enforced are usually a huge hindrance to market entrants. <Insert golden goose analogy here>
  - adwn 5y ago
    > Google [...] market entrants How did you draw a line from the former to the latter?
    - iends 5y ago
      I believe the parent was referring to things like GDPR which may have the unintended consequence of more entrenching the large incumbents because of the cost and time associated with compliance.
      - teddyh 5y ago
        The cost of compliance with GDPR is only high if you want to straddle the line of what is or isn’t acceptable behavior regarding saving user data and monetizing said data. Lawyers are expensive, and the more crooked you are, the more expensive they get. If, on the other hand, you don’t want to save any data on your users more than you obviously need (in order to do what your users explicitly ask for), then the cost is zero – you are already compliant.
        nostrebored 5y ago
        This is just wrong. The cost of DSARs to most businesses who are subject to GDPR fines is massive.
        malermeister 5y ago
        Then store less customer data. You're complaining that being data leech is expensive because of the GDPR. That's the point. Europeans don't want you to keep that much data on them. If your business model requires that, it is not one we want to encourage.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  I think the point the grandparent is making is that for a corporation, a fine is the price of bad behavior. Corporations don't make moral judgments between good and bad; as far as the company is concerned, they will make $X of profit from the behavior and it will cost $Y in fines, and if $X > $Y they will keep doing it. So for fines less than the profitability of the behavior, governments should just think of them as taxes, revenue-generation sources from continuing to allow the corporation to do whatever it's being fined for.
  - malermeister 5y ago
    ... and that's why the EU has high fines for shit like this, to make sure $Y > $X. It's also why tech companies keep complaining about EU regulators.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    That's ludicrous. It should go back into the governing bodies who do this to hire more auditors and investigators and lawyers to do even more of the Lord's work.
- ludamad 5y ago
  On the other hand, wouldn't mind if my taxes had some allocation I could attitude to them
josefx 5y ago
> THe title SHOULD read: That would only give them another way to put a positive spin on their anti competitive behavior.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> In ALL of any of these 'fine-ings' can we have a document of where the fines were applied and what they accomplished? Usually, this is impossible, because fines are tossed into a large pool of fungible money which is periodically allocated, but the allocation isn’t done per individual fine. Of course, the budget which applies to the fund involved is usually public, so insofar as it is approximately and imprecisely (in relation to a specific fine) possible, it is already done routinely.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  This money should be fed back into the regulatory system to provide fund for expanding audits of these companies which are clearly out of control. Corporations are basically entities without morals. They only care about the legality of situations and interpretations thereof that their lawyers think they can get away with so as much oversight as possible would be great.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    This sets up the worst incentives. Regulators would get paid by the fines they extract, so it would be in their benefit to chase any lawsuit against FAANGs, no matter how tenuous, while letting the 99.99% of other companies run amok because they wouldn't result in the billion dollar paydays.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      What we have right now is only half way working why not give it ample funds to fix it? We have judges to decide if a government dept is overstepping its bounds. To always say "bureaucracy is bad, always" is not a very good tautology.
ohmaigad 5y ago
This is just dumb. Would you prefer if executives were sent to prison? These fines are beneficial in the way that business might think twice before fucking over people.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > Would you prefer if executives were sent to prison Actually that'd be great for serious transgressions. They're at the helm, they make decisions, they reap the rewards, why shouldn't they also be punished when the company fucks up seriously?
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
    Anti-trust isn't a crime. And there are reasons for that other than what cynicism suggests. It is far more difficult to pin down the definition, for example, than it is even for typical white-collar crimes (fraud etc.). And it's morally dubious to punish someone in unpredictable ways. (the (civil(!) anti-trust fines don't create new harm, but are intended to fix a situation, which makes them more acceptable. As an analogy: when someone damages your car and has to pay for repairs, that payment is zero-sum for society. if you hit him in the head, that's a net-negative because you (shouldn't/don't) derive as much benefit from it as they are harmed) Then, practically speaking, the groups involved are simply too large to pin outcomes on individuals, and we don't do guilt-by-association. The timescales are also wrong, because the people responsible will often have moved on long ago. And the people usually do not participate in the spoils anywhere close to linearly with their involvement (which is a good thing because it prevents most corporate malfeasance: you aren't going expose yourself to moral and criminal guilt at a 9-5 job). Also,, the standard-of-proof that is required is higher ("beyond reasonable doubt", i. e. 95%) than it is in civil cases ("preponderance of evidence", i. e. 50%). This is an outcrop of that moral-guilt vs responsibility thing from above, and also from the fact that in civil court it's often arbitrary what side of the courtroom you end up on.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      I'm not talking about anti-trust per se, even though i think egregious cases still deserve serious punishment. I mean shitshows like Boeing, Equifax and similar. Where the company showed blatant disregard for safety and security, and it was really not a single person making a mistake, but big parts of the entity being rotten to the core. For such things, the executives should face consequences in the form of a combination of: go to prison for some time, face heavy fines against their personal wealth ( ideally proportional), and have bans on leading any commercial for some time afterwards. The incentives are all wrong for everything below fraud ( Enron level). Boeing got away with literally manslaughter through criminal negligence, and what consequences where there? The CEO got a golden parachute, and a chief pilot got thrown under the bus. That will make them learn their lesson, right?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

TOTs.... An where have thesse 'fines' resulted in anything beneficial to human society. THe title *SHOULD* read: Google forced to fund N schools in Germany f

caymanjim 5y ago

The fines shouldn't be tied to anything. The point of fines is to punish bad behavior. The fine is the incentive to change behavior. I don't want fines being tied to specific rewards for a subset of society or a special interest. Once you start doing that, the incentives are broken. The benefit to society is that Google changes their behavior to avoid being fined again. The money should go into general government funding, not to "schools" or any other specific thing.

andruby 5y ago
I'm wondering what the effect would be if the money from the fines is burned (destroyed). The company would still feel the same incentive. For the government on the other hand, it removes the incentive to fine for one's own gain. I like that it would remove this conflict of interest. By removing the money, it's essentially very slightly reducing inflation.
- niyikiza 5y ago
  Actually that can be quite an equitable way of distributing the fines (to all people holding the currency in question).
  - caymanjim 5y ago
    While in theory this sounds nice, in practice it means everyone gets nothing. It's a rare case where I'd rather see the government get money. A comparable scenario is a class-action lawsuit; a company might lose a billion dollar class action lawsuit, but what that means is a third goes to lawyers, a third goes to administrative overhead, and the remaining third is distributed to the plaintiffs as a bunch of checks for 50 cents a piece (and then they're taxed on it!). I'd rather the government get one big check.
    - samstave 5y ago
      Hmmm... >>While in theory this sounds nice, in practice it means everyone gets nothing. im trying to find out where anyone got something?
easytiger 5y ago
Legislation is often changed so as to target big companies in the industry du jour. Just look at how tenuous many of the prosecutions in France of Google are. They aren't aimed at market fairness even remotely, but to extract wealth to the state. It's particularly noticeable because the regulations selectively enforced are usually a huge hindrance to market entrants. <Insert golden goose analogy here>
- adwn 5y ago
  > Google [...] market entrants How did you draw a line from the former to the latter?
  - iends 5y ago
    I believe the parent was referring to things like GDPR which may have the unintended consequence of more entrenching the large incumbents because of the cost and time associated with compliance.
    - teddyh 5y ago
      The cost of compliance with GDPR is only high if you want to straddle the line of what is or isn’t acceptable behavior regarding saving user data and monetizing said data. Lawyers are expensive, and the more crooked you are, the more expensive they get. If, on the other hand, you don’t want to save any data on your users more than you obviously need (in order to do what your users explicitly ask for), then the cost is zero – you are already compliant.
      - nostrebored 5y ago
        This is just wrong. The cost of DSARs to most businesses who are subject to GDPR fines is massive.
        malermeister 5y ago
        Then store less customer data. You're complaining that being data leech is expensive because of the GDPR. That's the point. Europeans don't want you to keep that much data on them. If your business model requires that, it is not one we want to encourage.
nostrademons 5y ago
I think the point the grandparent is making is that for a corporation, a fine is the price of bad behavior. Corporations don't make moral judgments between good and bad; as far as the company is concerned, they will make $X of profit from the behavior and it will cost $Y in fines, and if $X > $Y they will keep doing it. So for fines less than the profitability of the behavior, governments should just think of them as taxes, revenue-generation sources from continuing to allow the corporation to do whatever it's being fined for.
- malermeister 5y ago
  ... and that's why the EU has high fines for shit like this, to make sure $Y > $X. It's also why tech companies keep complaining about EU regulators.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  That's ludicrous. It should go back into the governing bodies who do this to hire more auditors and investigators and lawyers to do even more of the Lord's work.
ludamad 5y ago
On the other hand, wouldn't mind if my taxes had some allocation I could attitude to them

josefx 5y ago

> THe title SHOULD read: That would only give them another way to put a positive spin on their anti competitive behavior.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> In ALL of any of these 'fine-ings' can we have a document of where the fines were applied and what they accomplished? Usually, this is impossible, because fines are tossed into a large pool of fungible money which is periodically allocated, but the allocation isn’t done per individual fine. Of course, the budget which applies to the fund involved is usually public, so insofar as it is approximately and imprecisely (in relation to a specific fine) possible, it is already done routinely.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
This money should be fed back into the regulatory system to provide fund for expanding audits of these companies which are clearly out of control. Corporations are basically entities without morals. They only care about the legality of situations and interpretations thereof that their lawyers think they can get away with so as much oversight as possible would be great.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  This sets up the worst incentives. Regulators would get paid by the fines they extract, so it would be in their benefit to chase any lawsuit against FAANGs, no matter how tenuous, while letting the 99.99% of other companies run amok because they wouldn't result in the billion dollar paydays.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    What we have right now is only half way working why not give it ample funds to fix it? We have judges to decide if a government dept is overstepping its bounds. To always say "bureaucracy is bad, always" is not a very good tautology.

ohmaigad 5y ago

This is just dumb. Would you prefer if executives were sent to prison? These fines are beneficial in the way that business might think twice before fucking over people.

sofixa 5y ago
> Would you prefer if executives were sent to prison Actually that'd be great for serious transgressions. They're at the helm, they make decisions, they reap the rewards, why shouldn't they also be punished when the company fucks up seriously?
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Anti-trust isn't a crime. And there are reasons for that other than what cynicism suggests. It is far more difficult to pin down the definition, for example, than it is even for typical white-collar crimes (fraud etc.). And it's morally dubious to punish someone in unpredictable ways. (the (civil(!) anti-trust fines don't create new harm, but are intended to fix a situation, which makes them more acceptable. As an analogy: when someone damages your car and has to pay for repairs, that payment is zero-sum for society. if you hit him in the head, that's a net-negative because you (shouldn't/don't) derive as much benefit from it as they are harmed) Then, practically speaking, the groups involved are simply too large to pin outcomes on individuals, and we don't do guilt-by-association. The timescales are also wrong, because the people responsible will often have moved on long ago. And the people usually do not participate in the spoils anywhere close to linearly with their involvement (which is a good thing because it prevents most corporate malfeasance: you aren't going expose yourself to moral and criminal guilt at a 9-5 job). Also,, the standard-of-proof that is required is higher ("beyond reasonable doubt", i. e. 95%) than it is in civil cases ("preponderance of evidence", i. e. 50%). This is an outcrop of that moral-guilt vs responsibility thing from above, and also from the fact that in civil court it's often arbitrary what side of the courtroom you end up on.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    I'm not talking about anti-trust per se, even though i think egregious cases still deserve serious punishment. I mean shitshows like Boeing, Equifax and similar. Where the company showed blatant disregard for safety and security, and it was really not a single person making a mistake, but big parts of the entity being rotten to the core. For such things, the executives should face consequences in the form of a combination of: go to prison for some time, face heavy fines against their personal wealth ( ideally proportional), and have bans on leading any commercial for some time afterwards. The incentives are all wrong for everything below fraud ( Enron level). Boeing got away with literally manslaughter through criminal negligence, and what consequences where there? The CEO got a golden parachute, and a chief pilot got thrown under the bus. That will make them learn their lesson, right?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]