7 ms·

As a general rule, the reason a company does something nefarious is that it knows it can get away with it. We need to fix the broken & corrupt legal systems so

As a general rule, the reason a company does something nefarious is that it knows it can get away with it. We need to fix the broken & corrupt legal systems so that companies have not just equivalent penalties like individuals would (the equivalent of jail would be that all profits go to the state for the duration of the "jail" term), but be given even less leniency/benefit of the doubt since massive companies have way more resources to investigate & comply with laws than individuals do.

mouse_ 3y ago
"We need to negotiate a better living arrangement with our evil vampire overlords" I'm not convinced
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Oh, the EU shows that even the biggest corporations can be brought to knee if they pull off too much bullshit. Apple had to introduce USB-C and will have to open up their App Store and NFC interface, Meta got slapped with a billion dollar GDPR fine, Microsoft to this day has to sell European versions of Windows that don't come with a media player or that allow everyone to choose their default browser...
  - dantheman 3y ago
    The EU is just shaking down foreign companies because they can't compete.
    - orwin 3y ago
      The EU has actually enforce anti-monopolistic laws, even if it's quite slow. You should compare history of the food industry in Europe and in North America, I think this show well how much the US politicians changed over the last 50 years.
    - vertis 3y ago
      The EU is protecting it's citizens. You don't have to spend very much time comparing the EU (and Europe in general) to the US to find differences in philosophy. US has a very individual centric attitude where everyone is an temporarily inconvenienced millionare and Europe has a much more collective attitude. I will take the European attitude over the US one any day of the week (and I'm from neither, I'm Antipodean). Every billionare is a policy failure.
      - dotandgtfo 3y ago
        Not to mention that Booking.com is a European company that has explicitly been targeted by the upcoming digital markets act.
        dantheman 3y ago
        Booking.com got bought by priceline.
    - _jal 3y ago
      You can phrase it in whatever way you prefer, but GP's point remains - a fine measured as a percentage of global revenue has been demonstrated to modify huge corporations' behavior. FWIW, I think the EU's recent legal behavior is only about 1/3 foreign-company envy. There's a lot of misguided do-gooderism and a large dash of control-freakery, too, not to mention intelligence and LEO wishlists.
    - isoprophlex 3y ago
      But look at what "to compete" means in the European point of view, look at how they see the practices that you describe as "being competitive": nefarious, unethical practices to fuel growth for the hell of it. If they can't compete on some short-term, enshittification-causing metric, fine by me.
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      Aww, is that what you tell yourself?
    - arp242 3y ago
      Aside from the fact that booking.com is a Dutch company (although Booking Holding is US, so who the hell knows any more as I have no idea how that all fits together...), no one is forcing anyone to do business in Europe. If you don't like the rules then don't play; that's fine, no hard feelings. That's how it works everywhere, including in the US. What you DON'T get to do is set the rules for OUR countries. Several of these companies have been under the misapprehension that's how things work, and they are being (slowly) cured of that delusion (far too late, but better late than never...)
SoftTalker 3y ago
People don't go to jail for not paying their bills. It's a case of "if I owe a hotel $200, that's my problem, if Booking.com owes a hotel $200,000 that's the hotel's problem"
- 83457 3y ago
  Unless that bill is to the government.
  - maximinus_thrax 3y ago
    or to the ex spouse
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Unless fraud is involved, no. They might garnish your wages, seize assets, etc. but you won't go to jail.
  - jimt1234 3y ago
    I think it's even more true in this situation. If you or I owe the IRS $2000, they're gonna come after us and get all their money. But if EvilCorp owes the IRS $200-million, the lawyers will argue about it for 3 years, and in the end, EvilCorp will end up paying less than half of the original amount.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    It has to be a lot more than 200k, but the principle still applies. If you owe some government 500 billion, you are probably also a government.
- gopher_space 3y ago
  If you can’t make rent the police get involved at the end, but society wouldn’t really think of you as a person in that scenario.
kbenson 3y ago
> the equivalent of jail would be that all profits go to the state for the duration of the "jail" term For punishing corporations (for whatever legal reason) I would rather see a percentage of c-suite compensation for a time period (including end of year bonuses) confiscated, maybe along with a fine based on profit (so stock values are hit as well, so that both can't be used to avoid penalties and also to signal to the market it's a bad idea). The problem with fining a company is that often you hurt a lot of the lower ranked employees that had no power and often no knowledge of the problems, and usually weren't involved in any way, sometimes to the point where they lose their jobs if the company is hurting to a much larger degree than the people running the company do, which is why punishing corporations is sometimes hard. We need to incentivize and punish the people that actually decide the problematic policies and actions and not those that just happen to be in proximity and/or are linked financially, to the degree that we can (obviously it's hard and no perfect solution exists).
- diogenes4 3y ago
  I imagine they'd be a lot more responsive to prison time, personally. A fine doesn't seem to capture the correct incentives here.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    Hear, hear. And more corporate lawyers should be getting disbarred than the current status quo.
  - kbenson 3y ago
    Just because you have no sympathy for the large corporations doesn't mean they should be treated unfairly, and going to jail because of actions that actually weren't in your control is definitely unfair. Corporations are made of people, and can by large multinationals, or small mom and pop operations with a few tens of people (or less). Should someone that has a company that runs a few ice cream shops in town go to jail because of actions of people under them? Because it's not like it's always going to be something that was condones or expected from management, and while I'm okay with monetary damages that don't aim to dismantle the company entirely even if management didn't really know what's going on (that's maybe a good way to make them care and pay attention), I'm not okay with sending them to jail because of mismanagement. Not only is that unfair, it would have a huge chilling factor on entrepreneurs. And not just the startup kind, the people that want to open a restaurant or run a small business. And to fully put this in context, this is under an article about booking.com paying slowly. You think jail time is appropriate for that? What if they're having cashflow problems? If they aren't and it's intentional, how do you distinguish this from that?
lefstathiou 3y ago
Very simple solution: the US should implement prevailing parties clause (prevailing party wins legal fees by default in a lawsuit) as law of the land by default. We had a guy in Australia trying to use our trademark, in the US they would call my bluff and I would have to spend tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to sue. In Australia we sent a polite letter, outlined our case that was pretty clear, reminded him he would pay our legal if we escalated and made it clear we would, and the result was immediate. In short, companies shouldn’t be incentivized to play game theory on whether or not you will sue me if I trample your rights.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  That sounds like an amazing way to empower corporate legal bullying and copyright trolls, and ensure that no single entity could ever take a company to court ever again.
  - V__ 3y ago
    How so?
    - msandford 3y ago
      Big company threatens to spend $100 million on the lawsuit to make sure they win. By outspending you they exhaust your funds and win by default. Then you go doubly bankrupt when you have to pay their legal bills.
      - lefstathiou 3y ago
        That’s not how the calculus works actually. Today a corporate bully can safely count on you being a rational actor (and not spend $1mm to win $400k) and push the envelop of competition and appropriation of data and trade secrets with limited recourse. Under a prevailing party construct, the risk of doing so is enormous. Thus, in instances where they are objectively wrong, they lose big. In instances you are objectively wrong, you lose big. In instances where it is not black and white, where there is merit to both sides of the argument, you settle. All this is achieved with little intervention by the courts.
babypuncher 3y ago
the equivalent of jail time should be actual jail time. determine which members of the executive team decided it was OK to literally steal from people and put them in jail.
CM30 3y ago
Not even just compared to individuals, but even to smaller competitors. If a smaller company acted like Booking did here, they'd be sued into oblivion or out of business in no time. Same with a shop that sold counterfeit goods as casually as Amazon or an app store seems to, or one that fired people as suddenly as Twitter/X did those months back. The problem is that laws are basically just 'suggestions' if you're rich/your company is rich, and life altering consequences if you/your company is not. There should actually be jail time for corporate leaders that break the law, and the potential of being forcefully removed from office or the company itself forced to shut down if poor behaviour continues.

mouse_ 3y ago

"We need to negotiate a better living arrangement with our evil vampire overlords" I'm not convinced

mschuster91 3y ago
Oh, the EU shows that even the biggest corporations can be brought to knee if they pull off too much bullshit. Apple had to introduce USB-C and will have to open up their App Store and NFC interface, Meta got slapped with a billion dollar GDPR fine, Microsoft to this day has to sell European versions of Windows that don't come with a media player or that allow everyone to choose their default browser...
- dantheman 3y ago
  The EU is just shaking down foreign companies because they can't compete.
  - orwin 3y ago
    The EU has actually enforce anti-monopolistic laws, even if it's quite slow. You should compare history of the food industry in Europe and in North America, I think this show well how much the US politicians changed over the last 50 years.
  - vertis 3y ago
    The EU is protecting it's citizens. You don't have to spend very much time comparing the EU (and Europe in general) to the US to find differences in philosophy. US has a very individual centric attitude where everyone is an temporarily inconvenienced millionare and Europe has a much more collective attitude. I will take the European attitude over the US one any day of the week (and I'm from neither, I'm Antipodean). Every billionare is a policy failure.
    - dotandgtfo 3y ago
      Not to mention that Booking.com is a European company that has explicitly been targeted by the upcoming digital markets act.
      - dantheman 3y ago
        Booking.com got bought by priceline.
  - _jal 3y ago
    You can phrase it in whatever way you prefer, but GP's point remains - a fine measured as a percentage of global revenue has been demonstrated to modify huge corporations' behavior. FWIW, I think the EU's recent legal behavior is only about 1/3 foreign-company envy. There's a lot of misguided do-gooderism and a large dash of control-freakery, too, not to mention intelligence and LEO wishlists.
  - isoprophlex 3y ago
    But look at what "to compete" means in the European point of view, look at how they see the practices that you describe as "being competitive": nefarious, unethical practices to fuel growth for the hell of it. If they can't compete on some short-term, enshittification-causing metric, fine by me.
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    Aww, is that what you tell yourself?
  - arp242 3y ago
    Aside from the fact that booking.com is a Dutch company (although Booking Holding is US, so who the hell knows any more as I have no idea how that all fits together...), no one is forcing anyone to do business in Europe. If you don't like the rules then don't play; that's fine, no hard feelings. That's how it works everywhere, including in the US. What you DON'T get to do is set the rules for OUR countries. Several of these companies have been under the misapprehension that's how things work, and they are being (slowly) cured of that delusion (far too late, but better late than never...)

SoftTalker 3y ago

People don't go to jail for not paying their bills. It's a case of "if I owe a hotel $200, that's my problem, if Booking.com owes a hotel $200,000 that's the hotel's problem"

83457 3y ago
Unless that bill is to the government.
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago
  or to the ex spouse
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Unless fraud is involved, no. They might garnish your wages, seize assets, etc. but you won't go to jail.
- jimt1234 3y ago
  I think it's even more true in this situation. If you or I owe the IRS $2000, they're gonna come after us and get all their money. But if EvilCorp owes the IRS $200-million, the lawyers will argue about it for 3 years, and in the end, EvilCorp will end up paying less than half of the original amount.
- ben_w 3y ago
  It has to be a lot more than 200k, but the principle still applies. If you owe some government 500 billion, you are probably also a government.
gopher_space 3y ago
If you can’t make rent the police get involved at the end, but society wouldn’t really think of you as a person in that scenario.

kbenson 3y ago

> the equivalent of jail would be that all profits go to the state for the duration of the "jail" term For punishing corporations (for whatever legal reason) I would rather see a percentage of c-suite compensation for a time period (including end of year bonuses) confiscated, maybe along with a fine based on profit (so stock values are hit as well, so that both can't be used to avoid penalties and also to signal to the market it's a bad idea). The problem with fining a company is that often you hurt a lot of the lower ranked employees that had no power and often no knowledge of the problems, and usually weren't involved in any way, sometimes to the point where they lose their jobs if the company is hurting to a much larger degree than the people running the company do, which is why punishing corporations is sometimes hard. We need to incentivize and punish the people that actually decide the problematic policies and actions and not those that just happen to be in proximity and/or are linked financially, to the degree that we can (obviously it's hard and no perfect solution exists).

diogenes4 3y ago
I imagine they'd be a lot more responsive to prison time, personally. A fine doesn't seem to capture the correct incentives here.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Hear, hear. And more corporate lawyers should be getting disbarred than the current status quo.
- kbenson 3y ago
  Just because you have no sympathy for the large corporations doesn't mean they should be treated unfairly, and going to jail because of actions that actually weren't in your control is definitely unfair. Corporations are made of people, and can by large multinationals, or small mom and pop operations with a few tens of people (or less). Should someone that has a company that runs a few ice cream shops in town go to jail because of actions of people under them? Because it's not like it's always going to be something that was condones or expected from management, and while I'm okay with monetary damages that don't aim to dismantle the company entirely even if management didn't really know what's going on (that's maybe a good way to make them care and pay attention), I'm not okay with sending them to jail because of mismanagement. Not only is that unfair, it would have a huge chilling factor on entrepreneurs. And not just the startup kind, the people that want to open a restaurant or run a small business. And to fully put this in context, this is under an article about booking.com paying slowly. You think jail time is appropriate for that? What if they're having cashflow problems? If they aren't and it's intentional, how do you distinguish this from that?

lefstathiou 3y ago

Very simple solution: the US should implement prevailing parties clause (prevailing party wins legal fees by default in a lawsuit) as law of the land by default. We had a guy in Australia trying to use our trademark, in the US they would call my bluff and I would have to spend tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to sue. In Australia we sent a polite letter, outlined our case that was pretty clear, reminded him he would pay our legal if we escalated and made it clear we would, and the result was immediate. In short, companies shouldn’t be incentivized to play game theory on whether or not you will sue me if I trample your rights.

MSFT_Edging 3y ago
That sounds like an amazing way to empower corporate legal bullying and copyright trolls, and ensure that no single entity could ever take a company to court ever again.
- V__ 3y ago
  How so?
  - msandford 3y ago
    Big company threatens to spend $100 million on the lawsuit to make sure they win. By outspending you they exhaust your funds and win by default. Then you go doubly bankrupt when you have to pay their legal bills.
    - lefstathiou 3y ago
      That’s not how the calculus works actually. Today a corporate bully can safely count on you being a rational actor (and not spend $1mm to win $400k) and push the envelop of competition and appropriation of data and trade secrets with limited recourse. Under a prevailing party construct, the risk of doing so is enormous. Thus, in instances where they are objectively wrong, they lose big. In instances you are objectively wrong, you lose big. In instances where it is not black and white, where there is merit to both sides of the argument, you settle. All this is achieved with little intervention by the courts.

babypuncher 3y ago

the equivalent of jail time should be actual jail time. determine which members of the executive team decided it was OK to literally steal from people and put them in jail.

CM30 3y ago

Not even just compared to individuals, but even to smaller competitors. If a smaller company acted like Booking did here, they'd be sued into oblivion or out of business in no time. Same with a shop that sold counterfeit goods as casually as Amazon or an app store seems to, or one that fired people as suddenly as Twitter/X did those months back. The problem is that laws are basically just 'suggestions' if you're rich/your company is rich, and life altering consequences if you/your company is not. There should actually be jail time for corporate leaders that break the law, and the potential of being forcefully removed from office or the company itself forced to shut down if poor behaviour continues.