5 ms·

The only way to tackle this is to put leadership in prison. If that is not possible give them the oligarch experience; frozen assets, interpol warrant, etc. It

by tokai 3y ago

The only way to tackle this is to put leadership in prison. If that is not possible give them the oligarch experience; frozen assets, interpol warrant, etc. It makes no sense that breaking the law gives milder consequences just as long as your crime is transnational and very extensive in scope.

Chris2048 3y ago
Why not higher fines? % of profit that increases each time?
- anticorporate 3y ago
  Once you reach a certain level of wealth, fines are no longer consequential. When you can restructure both your corporate and personal assets to span multiple countries with different regulations and poor cooperation, you've effective avoided them.
  - hiq 3y ago
    What about the 4% of the global turnover of a company as mentioned in https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/fines-penalties/ https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/fines-penalties/?
    - anticorporate 3y ago
      If it were effective, we wouldn't all endure daily GDPR violations. But we do.
      - Chris2048 3y ago
        Non-enforcement is a different issue to fines being too low.
        anticorporate 3y ago
        They're related, though. A portion of fines fund enforcement activity. (IMHO, a higher portion should go to enforcement. Right now way too much goes into general funds.)
  - Chris2048 3y ago
    > fines are no longer consequential I don't see how this can possibly be true. Any corp has finite money, and operating costs; If the fines are high enough, they will be consequential. > to span multiple countries you can't really evade US fines/sanction and continue to operate in the west.
    - coderenegade 3y ago
      No government is going to fine Amazon or Google enough to break the company. It would displace thousands of workers, and have a serious impact on the local economy where those companies are based, if not the whole country. If the fine is large enough to have a material impact, it's the rank and file who are laid off as the company restructures, and the company then uses tricks like tax offsets to pull through from a loss of profit. This is before considering political ramifications, e.g. it's in the US' best interests to have the largest tech companies, and clipping their wings too much would cede ground to foreign competitors. At the end of the day, the C-suite either know that the law is being broken, or they don't. One makes them responsible, and the other makes them criminally negligent. I absolutely believe that C-suite executives of VW, for example, should have been thrown in jail for diesel-gate. Not knowing the law is not an excuse for breaking it. Similarly, if you're presiding over a company, and your company is breaking the law, plausible deniability shouldn't be a defense. If you're getting paid to run the company, you are responsible.
- tigrezno 3y ago
  because they will make you (the end user) pay the bill by increasing prices?
  - Chris2048 3y ago
    How do they make any user do anything? These aren't water utility companies, there is a limit to how they can be fined and still compete. I assume many things are already priced at the highest number the market will pay. How, for example, will FB/meta pass the cost to social-network end users?
- arp242 3y ago
  I just prefer personal accountability because it seems a fair and just way to organize things. These things don't happen as a force of nature: it's someone (or a bunch of people) making a decision, and then someone (or several people) implementing it. If I scam someone in my brick and mortar store with fake products I will be held personally responsible as the owner, and rightfully so. And if other people knowingly participate in the scam they will be held responsible too. Never mind all the other stuff like lying reviews, dangerous products, etc. So why aren't we holding Jeff Bezos and the rest of Amazon leadership's team similarly accountable? They're not innocent bystanders here. Somehow there's this idea that personal accountability just doesn't apply except in cases of VERY blatant outright fraud (Enron, VW Diesel, Theranos), and even then it's haphazard and often weak (no one went to prison for e.g. Deepwater Horizon). IMO it's one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas. The bigger the company (and thus stakes, and negative effects) the lower the accountability is. The Devil's Dictionary from 1906 already observed this with: "CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
  - Chris2048 3y ago
    But it'll likely conflict directly with personal freedoms. Plus what's the logic behind the most draconian of implementations? - If we can hold Bezos to account, why not every AMAZON shareholder?
    - arp242 3y ago
      I don't think it's draconian at all, or conflicting with personal freedoms. How would it conflict? Shareholders aren't making these decisions. But if shareholders voted for something they knew was illegal or could have known was illegal, then yes, maybe they should be held to account too.
      - Chris2048 3y ago
        > Shareholders aren't making these decisions What are "these decisions"? I assumed you are talking about punishing people like Bezos for the activities of Amazon, even without proof he had direct knowledge/involvement of them, purely based on his position as a c-suite figurehead?
- coderenegade 3y ago
  Because at a certain point, fines punish lower level workers rather than management. Furthermore, if the company is large enough, fining it to the extent that it collapses has material effects on the economy, which governments are incentivized to avoid. This isn't to say that there shouldn't be financial consequences for breaking the law -- of course there should. But management should also be thrown in prison when the company breaks the law, because they're in a position of responsibility (it's what they get paid for). Either they knew -- in which case they're personally liable -- or they didn't, in which case they're criminally negligent, and again, personally liable.
switch007 3y ago
> The only way to tackle this is to put leadership in prison Agreed. But law-makers and politicians in charge of the judiciary have been bought. Laws and the enforcement of them won't change any time soon
xbmcuser 3y ago
There is saying of Muhammad at least Imran Khan (Pakistan former prime minister) keeps reciting/saying that its Muhammad saying that nations have died/have destroyed themselves when the laws for the rich were different from the laws for the poor. I feel sometimes US is going through something like this poor people go to jail for doing things rich/ruling class pay a fine for and it is causing anti state feelings to emerge from different parts of the populace. So far the discontented are separate movements divided along race, education and party lines. But they are mostly asking for the same thing better lives.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ycdxvjp 3y ago
There is an endless supply of corporate robots to replace them. Instead there are options: 1. Govt walks in and just nationalizes them ala Japan post world war 2 where Mitsubishi, Sumimoto etc where just turned into puppets over night As in hostile takeover to influence how they use their loot. 2. Govt can then use the SpaceX model to disrupt brick and mortar sectors world wide (cement, steel, ships, planes, energy, fertilizer etc etc). The test will be bringing prices down of everything not just for Americans or the west but for everyone. other wise immigration waves just like the drugs flowing into the west will never stop. Tech is supposed to fuck prices up. Google once upon a time did it for email, chat, video, search etc. I don't see why it can't happen with everything. We need grand goals not just how to add 6 more cameras into another fucking phone.
- dox_shepherd 3y ago
  Yeah but is government really less corrupt than big tech? Its very human to want a hero come save the day but I fear that we'd just be replacing one bad actor with another.
  - input_sh 3y ago
    If we still lived under monarchy, I'd agree 100%, but we don't. There's at least a theoretical chance of voting the government out in favour of someone marginally better. I don't know what are the odds of that happening, but it's definitely bigger than 0%. And if we're not in the board of directors of a company, our odds of making them less corrupt is precisely 0%.
    - qp11 3y ago
      Also post world war 2, the Japanese govts did pull it off by taking control of industry and getting everyone to row in a particular direction.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    The government as a monolith, probably? The government in specific departments, maybe? Corporate combinations are profit machines. Governments are bureaucracy and vote-getting machines. Pick your monomaniacalism. But! Bureaucracy does have the benefit of being defined by law. Which... big tech really doesn't.
ChatGTP 3y ago
Tech controls politics through social media, you cannot stop it now. They can moderate any negative content which might hurt their plans. Not a good situation.
Oarch 3y ago
How about we start invalidating their patents as punishment? Investors take IP very seriously.
barryrandall 3y ago
Double the fine every time a business violates the same law. Businesses that treat fines as a "cost of doing business" will quickly see their costs trending toward infinity and will be forced to change or declare bankruptcy.
angra_mainyu 3y ago
> The only way to tackle this is to put leadership in prison. This is not the kind of democracy I want to live in. I'd much, much rather see a grassroots movement pushing to once again return to the marketplace of ideas, where for each "category" you have a host of apps competing against each other, not just one or two. As a society, we should learn to hone the oscillatory nature of the complex system that is a tech niche: a niche forms => many apps populate the space => one app begins dominating => it consumes the rest (e.g: buy outs) => eventually the "one" app is replaced by a new market of apps. We're failing on the last step and I'd like to get there without using the government's monopoly on violence.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  > rather see a grassroots movement pushing to once again return to the marketplace of ideas, where for each "category" you have a host of apps competing against each other, not just one or two. IMHO, what we need to return to is "free (provider choice) and competitive (provider price) access to the market." E.g. what the internet and web originally were, which begat the current tech giants (including the modern versions of Microsoft and Apple) by allowing them to circumvent existing gatekeepers. Which, critically, means removing the requirement to pay a tithe of your success (or attempt) to anyone. Because that's where big tech is currently financially entrenched -- to be on our platforms (i.e. any used platform), you have to pay us. Which leads to tails-you-lose-heads-I-win scenarios, which strategically block any future challenger from emerging, because they're sacrificing so much of their profit to existing gatekeepers. The EU got their regulatory targets correct -- either you can be a gatekeeper, controlling access to a large number of users, and abide by heavy limitations on your ability to tax companies that go through you; or you can not be in a gatekeeper position and compete fully. But you don't get to be a gatekeeper and do anything you want.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
The challenge is that there’s no actual law that you would arrest them under. So the real goal is to have Congress create a law that states that if a CEO is not a fiduciary of the employees (in contrast to an fiduciary of investors) they should be jailed Seems like that would be a good law Investors - despite the claims from fund managers - aren’t moving countries to avoid this stuff because the actual LPs are American institutional 401k and Funds which theoretically are employees. So a law requiring corporate management to prioritize labor over capital would I think actually make a good impact.
jmyeet 3y ago
Let's compare. In China, two people were executed for a tainted milk scandal [1], In the US, Purdue and the Sackler family were significantly responsible for the opioid epidemic. They knowingly liked about OxyContin. Not only have they avoided prison but the government tried to give them a deal where they could pay a fraction o the fortune they made doing it over a number of years so it would essentially be paid by earnings on the billions they get to keep [2]. Fines are the cost of doing business. They are nothing more than an expense item. People who knowingly cause people to die or otherwise cause great harm as leaders of a compnany should go to prison way more often. Every penny the Sacklers made should be seized by the government. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes-milk-scandal-pair https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes... [2]: https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-opioid-crisis-purdue-bankruptcy-bd417e036d9f6db4b2916fdfbdb56252 https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-opioid-crisis-purdu...

by tokai 3y ago

Chris2048 3y ago

Why not higher fines? % of profit that increases each time?

anticorporate 3y ago
Once you reach a certain level of wealth, fines are no longer consequential. When you can restructure both your corporate and personal assets to span multiple countries with different regulations and poor cooperation, you've effective avoided them.
- hiq 3y ago
  What about the 4% of the global turnover of a company as mentioned in https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/fines-penalties/ https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/fines-penalties/?
  - anticorporate 3y ago
    If it were effective, we wouldn't all endure daily GDPR violations. But we do.
    - Chris2048 3y ago
      Non-enforcement is a different issue to fines being too low.
      - anticorporate 3y ago
        They're related, though. A portion of fines fund enforcement activity. (IMHO, a higher portion should go to enforcement. Right now way too much goes into general funds.)
- Chris2048 3y ago
  > fines are no longer consequential I don't see how this can possibly be true. Any corp has finite money, and operating costs; If the fines are high enough, they will be consequential. > to span multiple countries you can't really evade US fines/sanction and continue to operate in the west.
  - coderenegade 3y ago
    No government is going to fine Amazon or Google enough to break the company. It would displace thousands of workers, and have a serious impact on the local economy where those companies are based, if not the whole country. If the fine is large enough to have a material impact, it's the rank and file who are laid off as the company restructures, and the company then uses tricks like tax offsets to pull through from a loss of profit. This is before considering political ramifications, e.g. it's in the US' best interests to have the largest tech companies, and clipping their wings too much would cede ground to foreign competitors. At the end of the day, the C-suite either know that the law is being broken, or they don't. One makes them responsible, and the other makes them criminally negligent. I absolutely believe that C-suite executives of VW, for example, should have been thrown in jail for diesel-gate. Not knowing the law is not an excuse for breaking it. Similarly, if you're presiding over a company, and your company is breaking the law, plausible deniability shouldn't be a defense. If you're getting paid to run the company, you are responsible.
tigrezno 3y ago
because they will make you (the end user) pay the bill by increasing prices?
- Chris2048 3y ago
  How do they make any user do anything? These aren't water utility companies, there is a limit to how they can be fined and still compete. I assume many things are already priced at the highest number the market will pay. How, for example, will FB/meta pass the cost to social-network end users?
arp242 3y ago
I just prefer personal accountability because it seems a fair and just way to organize things. These things don't happen as a force of nature: it's someone (or a bunch of people) making a decision, and then someone (or several people) implementing it. If I scam someone in my brick and mortar store with fake products I will be held personally responsible as the owner, and rightfully so. And if other people knowingly participate in the scam they will be held responsible too. Never mind all the other stuff like lying reviews, dangerous products, etc. So why aren't we holding Jeff Bezos and the rest of Amazon leadership's team similarly accountable? They're not innocent bystanders here. Somehow there's this idea that personal accountability just doesn't apply except in cases of VERY blatant outright fraud (Enron, VW Diesel, Theranos), and even then it's haphazard and often weak (no one went to prison for e.g. Deepwater Horizon). IMO it's one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas. The bigger the company (and thus stakes, and negative effects) the lower the accountability is. The Devil's Dictionary from 1906 already observed this with: "CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
- Chris2048 3y ago
  But it'll likely conflict directly with personal freedoms. Plus what's the logic behind the most draconian of implementations? - If we can hold Bezos to account, why not every AMAZON shareholder?
  - arp242 3y ago
    I don't think it's draconian at all, or conflicting with personal freedoms. How would it conflict? Shareholders aren't making these decisions. But if shareholders voted for something they knew was illegal or could have known was illegal, then yes, maybe they should be held to account too.
    - Chris2048 3y ago
      > Shareholders aren't making these decisions What are "these decisions"? I assumed you are talking about punishing people like Bezos for the activities of Amazon, even without proof he had direct knowledge/involvement of them, purely based on his position as a c-suite figurehead?
coderenegade 3y ago
Because at a certain point, fines punish lower level workers rather than management. Furthermore, if the company is large enough, fining it to the extent that it collapses has material effects on the economy, which governments are incentivized to avoid. This isn't to say that there shouldn't be financial consequences for breaking the law -- of course there should. But management should also be thrown in prison when the company breaks the law, because they're in a position of responsibility (it's what they get paid for). Either they knew -- in which case they're personally liable -- or they didn't, in which case they're criminally negligent, and again, personally liable.

switch007 3y ago

> The only way to tackle this is to put leadership in prison Agreed. But law-makers and politicians in charge of the judiciary have been bought. Laws and the enforcement of them won't change any time soon

xbmcuser 3y ago

There is saying of Muhammad at least Imran Khan (Pakistan former prime minister) keeps reciting/saying that its Muhammad saying that nations have died/have destroyed themselves when the laws for the rich were different from the laws for the poor. I feel sometimes US is going through something like this poor people go to jail for doing things rich/ruling class pay a fine for and it is causing anti state feelings to emerge from different parts of the populace. So far the discontented are separate movements divided along race, education and party lines. But they are mostly asking for the same thing better lives.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ycdxvjp 3y ago

There is an endless supply of corporate robots to replace them. Instead there are options: 1. Govt walks in and just nationalizes them ala Japan post world war 2 where Mitsubishi, Sumimoto etc where just turned into puppets over night As in hostile takeover to influence how they use their loot. 2. Govt can then use the SpaceX model to disrupt brick and mortar sectors world wide (cement, steel, ships, planes, energy, fertilizer etc etc). The test will be bringing prices down of everything not just for Americans or the west but for everyone. other wise immigration waves just like the drugs flowing into the west will never stop. Tech is supposed to fuck prices up. Google once upon a time did it for email, chat, video, search etc. I don't see why it can't happen with everything. We need grand goals not just how to add 6 more cameras into another fucking phone.

dox_shepherd 3y ago
Yeah but is government really less corrupt than big tech? Its very human to want a hero come save the day but I fear that we'd just be replacing one bad actor with another.
- input_sh 3y ago
  If we still lived under monarchy, I'd agree 100%, but we don't. There's at least a theoretical chance of voting the government out in favour of someone marginally better. I don't know what are the odds of that happening, but it's definitely bigger than 0%. And if we're not in the board of directors of a company, our odds of making them less corrupt is precisely 0%.
  - qp11 3y ago
    Also post world war 2, the Japanese govts did pull it off by taking control of industry and getting everyone to row in a particular direction.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  The government as a monolith, probably? The government in specific departments, maybe? Corporate combinations are profit machines. Governments are bureaucracy and vote-getting machines. Pick your monomaniacalism. But! Bureaucracy does have the benefit of being defined by law. Which... big tech really doesn't.

ChatGTP 3y ago

Tech controls politics through social media, you cannot stop it now. They can moderate any negative content which might hurt their plans. Not a good situation.

Oarch 3y ago

How about we start invalidating their patents as punishment? Investors take IP very seriously.

barryrandall 3y ago

Double the fine every time a business violates the same law. Businesses that treat fines as a "cost of doing business" will quickly see their costs trending toward infinity and will be forced to change or declare bankruptcy.

angra_mainyu 3y ago

> The only way to tackle this is to put leadership in prison. This is not the kind of democracy I want to live in. I'd much, much rather see a grassroots movement pushing to once again return to the marketplace of ideas, where for each "category" you have a host of apps competing against each other, not just one or two. As a society, we should learn to hone the oscillatory nature of the complex system that is a tech niche: a niche forms => many apps populate the space => one app begins dominating => it consumes the rest (e.g: buy outs) => eventually the "one" app is replaced by a new market of apps. We're failing on the last step and I'd like to get there without using the government's monopoly on violence.

ethbr1 3y ago
> rather see a grassroots movement pushing to once again return to the marketplace of ideas, where for each "category" you have a host of apps competing against each other, not just one or two. IMHO, what we need to return to is "free (provider choice) and competitive (provider price) access to the market." E.g. what the internet and web originally were, which begat the current tech giants (including the modern versions of Microsoft and Apple) by allowing them to circumvent existing gatekeepers. Which, critically, means removing the requirement to pay a tithe of your success (or attempt) to anyone. Because that's where big tech is currently financially entrenched -- to be on our platforms (i.e. any used platform), you have to pay us. Which leads to tails-you-lose-heads-I-win scenarios, which strategically block any future challenger from emerging, because they're sacrificing so much of their profit to existing gatekeepers. The EU got their regulatory targets correct -- either you can be a gatekeeper, controlling access to a large number of users, and abide by heavy limitations on your ability to tax companies that go through you; or you can not be in a gatekeeper position and compete fully. But you don't get to be a gatekeeper and do anything you want.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

The challenge is that there’s no actual law that you would arrest them under. So the real goal is to have Congress create a law that states that if a CEO is not a fiduciary of the employees (in contrast to an fiduciary of investors) they should be jailed Seems like that would be a good law Investors - despite the claims from fund managers - aren’t moving countries to avoid this stuff because the actual LPs are American institutional 401k and Funds which theoretically are employees. So a law requiring corporate management to prioritize labor over capital would I think actually make a good impact.

jmyeet 3y ago

Let's compare. In China, two people were executed for a tainted milk scandal [1], In the US, Purdue and the Sackler family were significantly responsible for the opioid epidemic. They knowingly liked about OxyContin. Not only have they avoided prison but the government tried to give them a deal where they could pay a fraction o the fortune they made doing it over a number of years so it would essentially be paid by earnings on the billions they get to keep [2]. Fines are the cost of doing business. They are nothing more than an expense item. People who knowingly cause people to die or otherwise cause great harm as leaders of a compnany should go to prison way more often. Every penny the Sacklers made should be seized by the government. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes-milk-scandal-pair https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes... [2]: https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-opioid-crisis-purdue-bankruptcy-bd417e036d9f6db4b2916fdfbdb56252 https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-opioid-crisis-purdu...