3 ms·

> 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, th

• 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.