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Why aren’t these discouraged with such massive fines that the board and shareholders oust executives? Just another example of how weak the laws are from stoppin

Why aren’t these discouraged with such massive fines that the board and shareholders oust executives? Just another example of how weak the laws are from stopping unfair competition by mega corps. Small businesses and even rich startups have the decks stacked against them.

laser_eagle 1y ago
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lowwave 1y ago
A educated guess would be that the establishments intentionally want to have these monopolies around, so they stand down on the antitrust stuff, and in they would get total control and surveillance. That is how you get these guy like Peter Thiel going to Standford to recommend everyone to start a monopoly as their business model. In reality these guy (groups with low cost access to capital) have no clue how to really run a business they are just heavily subsidize by the establishment.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
The punishment should be percentage of government ownership. This dilutes the shareholders shares, which punishes who needs to be punished, but avoids the 'your fines will shut down the company' argument. Also when the government has ownership they have access to much more internal visibility and just general hassle. No company wants that.
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
This was a settlement, if the fines were massive, the settlement wouldn't have come as easily. And then if you start fining companies from other countries a lot, it becomes a trade issue and things get messy. In the worst case those companies just pull out of your market, and you are left with small businesses and startups but that might not make up for the services that the mega-corps were providing, and that might have adverse effects on other businesses in your country. So what happens is that they wind up going with non-massive fines to enforce compliance as a trade off (like you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing).
- ratelimitsteve 1y ago
  The problem is that we've taken "you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing" and used it as justification to make the fines significantly less than the profits from breaking the law, thus incentivizing lawbreaking.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    I don't think you get it. Detroying a company doesn't make the situation better, most regulation is centered around "punish and correct," rather than "vindictive destruction." The company has to survive to learn its lesson, or you haven't really made any progress.
    - ratelimitsteve 1y ago
      who said anything about destroying a company? I just said that the fine should be more than the profit from breaking the law or you're not punishing and correcting, you're encouraging lawbreaking and taking a cut of the profits.
    - account42 1y ago
      We accept essentially destroying the lives of bad enough criminals in order to deter others, why should the same be out of the question for corporations.
Aurornis 1y ago
If you want a real answer: If one country started implementing fines so massive that it was devastating multi-national companies then many companies would simply stop serving those countries. We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR. This has lessened somewhat as it has become more clear that those massive fines aren’t being handed out and the language has been clarified, but I sat through multiple meetings where companies were debating if they should block GDPR countries until the dust settled even though they believed themselves to be compliant. They didn’t want to risk someone making a mistake somewhere and costing the company a percentage of global revenues. Talking about massive fines that destroy big companies and crush their executives is really popular in internet comment sections but it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages.
- lores 1y ago
  But that's great for capitalism and competition, isn't it? Ethical startups popping up left and right to take over from big evil incumbent. What a market to seize.
- throw_a_grenade 1y ago
  So, iiuc your argument, they're too big to punish by lawful process in democratic countries. Then I argue they should be split up, which is another popular argument. Where do I sign up to be too big to punish?
- jjani 1y ago
  No, that's not the real answer at all, it's anything but. You have no idea just how much revenue Google et. al make from e.g. the EU. The shareholders would absolutely eat Google alive for just walking away from many billions of dollars rather than just complying. I've said this here before: > A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China. > What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out. > Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP. You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech. >We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR. So you do "% of global revenue", "gatekeeper/minimum size applicability" and so on. Absolutely trivial stuff, this has been figured out ages ago.
StanislavPetrov 1y ago
>Why aren’t these discouraged with such massive fines that the board and shareholders oust executives? Because the politicians and "regulators" rotate back into the private sector and earn generational wealth for playing ball.
supermatt 1y ago
Because 55m is a rounding error.
jjani 1y ago
For GDPR they already are, it should indeed be made to be the same for anti-competitiveness laws. https://gdpr.eu/fines/ https://gdpr.eu/fines/ > The less severe infringements could result in a fine of up to €10 million, or 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher. > These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher. And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".
- matkoniecz 1y ago
  Has Apple or Google actually paid any of this large GDPR fines?
- throwaway290 1y ago
  > And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country". It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.
  - okasaki 1y ago
    Why did Google leave? Because they didn't want to follow the law. Maybe they thought China would fold but they miscalculated. The incoherent views of the hn user: "We need to do something about the corporations" but also "China is evil for doing something about the corporations"
    - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
      If you try to take the average of the views of all HN users, and use that as a representative HN user, you are going to be confused.
  - mapt 1y ago
Atlas667 1y ago
Because capitalism is not able to regulate itself, no matter how much people say it can. And this has been known for 150+ years and it has been written about extensively, its just not considered acceptable/appropriate knowledge. Marxists study this.
- ben_w 1y ago
  The form of capitalism that existed when Marx wrote his thing, stopped being used in most places around the Great Depression era. Capitalism as we have it today is (roughly speaking) to laissez faire capitalism as modern China is to Maoism. Marxism isn't as wildly flawed as some want it to be — but it is very, very out of date, a response to a world which we no longer live in. Turned out there were a lot of ways to regulate capitalism besides all-in on Marxism.
  - Atlas667 1y ago
    > The form of capitalism that existed when Marx wrote his thing, stopped being used in most places around the Great Depression era. The type of capitalism Marx described is alive and well. It exists in the undeveloped parts of the world, and it is maintained through force by many capitalist blocks and their allies. People around the world are kept exploited because their economies eventually tie into ours, and their exploitation makes us "competitive". Just because its not you and your kids toiling all day doesn't mean there aren't any. And it was like that here too, it was only undone through force by socialists, that's why you're allowed to work 8 hours a day only, we have a minimum wage, and children aren't working in factories. This didn't happen by the graciousness of profiteers, it happened through the threat posed by the masses, people were killed on American streets for this. Don't ever forget that. That's how they rewrite history. Don't think it can't arise again, it evidently is... slowly.
- lazide 1y ago
  And communism and socialism do so much better? Just look up all the ecological and environmental disasters in Eastern Europe and Russia, or the insane economic fuckups from the ‘great leap forward’ (or even going on right now!) in China for a breath of fresh air, amiright? People be people. No system is going to magically solve these problems, but some (anything authoritarian, usually!) can certainly make them worse.
SwtCyber 1y ago
Until the penalties actually hurt, there's zero incentive to stop
- rvnx 1y ago
  Make management penally responsible like in make other cases, and the largest investors/employees who benefited from the scheme through dividends or stock attribution and then suddenly it will get resolved. They don’t care about civil cases since they are already rich and even if the company dies tomorrow they are going to be fine
  - andrepd 1y ago
    This is the thing. There needs to be personal responsability, not just some diffuse (and weak-ass) fine. As it stands the literal worst thing that can happen is the CEO gets fired with a multimillion dollar severance. Is this a joke? Just look at 2008. I'm convinced many things started to go downhill hard when the worst global financial meltdown since the 1930s went down with not one single person going to jail.
    - rvnx 1y ago
      Only the big fishes. Small retail investors and small home owners could not pay their loan anymore, got evicted and some eventually got jailed.
      - lurk2 1y ago
        > some eventually got jailed. Who are you referring to?
- dude250711 1y ago
  More like "not to even start", as I am sure they are just factoring in possible fines upfront.
crtified 1y ago
The principle of fines being made proportional to income - and set at a % level that hurts - is one of the few possible paths to fairness in this area. Like some European country(s) do with personal fines, afaik.
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago
  Like the famous "Finnish businessman hit with €121,000 speeding fine" ! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-businessman-hit-with-121000-speeding-fine https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
  - catlikesshrimp 1y ago
    And that is how you get to no traffic deaths in a year https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/27539-helsinki-records-zero-traffic-deaths-for-full-year.html https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
- bko 1y ago
  How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator? Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness. IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side
  - Steve16384 1y ago
    > How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. I think the reasoning as that when Google does it, it affects far more people than if (say) I sold a single phone with only my own apps pre-installed. Should I be fined $55 million?
gitprolinux 1y ago
[dead]

laser_eagle 1y ago

[dead]

lowwave 1y ago

A educated guess would be that the establishments intentionally want to have these monopolies around, so they stand down on the antitrust stuff, and in they would get total control and surveillance. That is how you get these guy like Peter Thiel going to Standford to recommend everyone to start a monopoly as their business model. In reality these guy (groups with low cost access to capital) have no clue how to really run a business they are just heavily subsidize by the establishment.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago

The punishment should be percentage of government ownership. This dilutes the shareholders shares, which punishes who needs to be punished, but avoids the 'your fines will shut down the company' argument. Also when the government has ownership they have access to much more internal visibility and just general hassle. No company wants that.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago

This was a settlement, if the fines were massive, the settlement wouldn't have come as easily. And then if you start fining companies from other countries a lot, it becomes a trade issue and things get messy. In the worst case those companies just pull out of your market, and you are left with small businesses and startups but that might not make up for the services that the mega-corps were providing, and that might have adverse effects on other businesses in your country. So what happens is that they wind up going with non-massive fines to enforce compliance as a trade off (like you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing).

ratelimitsteve 1y ago
The problem is that we've taken "you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing" and used it as justification to make the fines significantly less than the profits from breaking the law, thus incentivizing lawbreaking.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  I don't think you get it. Detroying a company doesn't make the situation better, most regulation is centered around "punish and correct," rather than "vindictive destruction." The company has to survive to learn its lesson, or you haven't really made any progress.
  - ratelimitsteve 1y ago
    who said anything about destroying a company? I just said that the fine should be more than the profit from breaking the law or you're not punishing and correcting, you're encouraging lawbreaking and taking a cut of the profits.
  - account42 1y ago
    We accept essentially destroying the lives of bad enough criminals in order to deter others, why should the same be out of the question for corporations.

Aurornis 1y ago

If you want a real answer: If one country started implementing fines so massive that it was devastating multi-national companies then many companies would simply stop serving those countries. We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR. This has lessened somewhat as it has become more clear that those massive fines aren’t being handed out and the language has been clarified, but I sat through multiple meetings where companies were debating if they should block GDPR countries until the dust settled even though they believed themselves to be compliant. They didn’t want to risk someone making a mistake somewhere and costing the company a percentage of global revenues. Talking about massive fines that destroy big companies and crush their executives is really popular in internet comment sections but it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages.

lores 1y ago
But that's great for capitalism and competition, isn't it? Ethical startups popping up left and right to take over from big evil incumbent. What a market to seize.
throw_a_grenade 1y ago
So, iiuc your argument, they're too big to punish by lawful process in democratic countries. Then I argue they should be split up, which is another popular argument. Where do I sign up to be too big to punish?
jjani 1y ago
No, that's not the real answer at all, it's anything but. You have no idea just how much revenue Google et. al make from e.g. the EU. The shareholders would absolutely eat Google alive for just walking away from many billions of dollars rather than just complying. I've said this here before: > A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China. > What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out. > Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP. You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech. >We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR. So you do "% of global revenue", "gatekeeper/minimum size applicability" and so on. Absolutely trivial stuff, this has been figured out ages ago.

StanislavPetrov 1y ago

>Why aren’t these discouraged with such massive fines that the board and shareholders oust executives? Because the politicians and "regulators" rotate back into the private sector and earn generational wealth for playing ball.

supermatt 1y ago

Because 55m is a rounding error.

jjani 1y ago

For GDPR they already are, it should indeed be made to be the same for anti-competitiveness laws. https://gdpr.eu/fines/ https://gdpr.eu/fines/ > The less severe infringements could result in a fine of up to €10 million, or 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher. > These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher. And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".

matkoniecz 1y ago
Has Apple or Google actually paid any of this large GDPR fines?
throwaway290 1y ago
> And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country". It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.
- okasaki 1y ago
  Why did Google leave? Because they didn't want to follow the law. Maybe they thought China would fold but they miscalculated. The incoherent views of the hn user: "We need to do something about the corporations" but also "China is evil for doing something about the corporations"
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    If you try to take the average of the views of all HN users, and use that as a representative HN user, you are going to be confused.
- mapt 1y ago

Atlas667 1y ago

Because capitalism is not able to regulate itself, no matter how much people say it can. And this has been known for 150+ years and it has been written about extensively, its just not considered acceptable/appropriate knowledge. Marxists study this.

ben_w 1y ago
The form of capitalism that existed when Marx wrote his thing, stopped being used in most places around the Great Depression era. Capitalism as we have it today is (roughly speaking) to laissez faire capitalism as modern China is to Maoism. Marxism isn't as wildly flawed as some want it to be — but it is very, very out of date, a response to a world which we no longer live in. Turned out there were a lot of ways to regulate capitalism besides all-in on Marxism.
- Atlas667 1y ago
  > The form of capitalism that existed when Marx wrote his thing, stopped being used in most places around the Great Depression era. The type of capitalism Marx described is alive and well. It exists in the undeveloped parts of the world, and it is maintained through force by many capitalist blocks and their allies. People around the world are kept exploited because their economies eventually tie into ours, and their exploitation makes us "competitive". Just because its not you and your kids toiling all day doesn't mean there aren't any. And it was like that here too, it was only undone through force by socialists, that's why you're allowed to work 8 hours a day only, we have a minimum wage, and children aren't working in factories. This didn't happen by the graciousness of profiteers, it happened through the threat posed by the masses, people were killed on American streets for this. Don't ever forget that. That's how they rewrite history. Don't think it can't arise again, it evidently is... slowly.
lazide 1y ago
And communism and socialism do so much better? Just look up all the ecological and environmental disasters in Eastern Europe and Russia, or the insane economic fuckups from the ‘great leap forward’ (or even going on right now!) in China for a breath of fresh air, amiright? People be people. No system is going to magically solve these problems, but some (anything authoritarian, usually!) can certainly make them worse.

SwtCyber 1y ago

Until the penalties actually hurt, there's zero incentive to stop

rvnx 1y ago
Make management penally responsible like in make other cases, and the largest investors/employees who benefited from the scheme through dividends or stock attribution and then suddenly it will get resolved. They don’t care about civil cases since they are already rich and even if the company dies tomorrow they are going to be fine
- andrepd 1y ago
  This is the thing. There needs to be personal responsability, not just some diffuse (and weak-ass) fine. As it stands the literal worst thing that can happen is the CEO gets fired with a multimillion dollar severance. Is this a joke? Just look at 2008. I'm convinced many things started to go downhill hard when the worst global financial meltdown since the 1930s went down with not one single person going to jail.
  - rvnx 1y ago
    Only the big fishes. Small retail investors and small home owners could not pay their loan anymore, got evicted and some eventually got jailed.
    - lurk2 1y ago
      > some eventually got jailed. Who are you referring to?
dude250711 1y ago
More like "not to even start", as I am sure they are just factoring in possible fines upfront.

crtified 1y ago

The principle of fines being made proportional to income - and set at a % level that hurts - is one of the few possible paths to fairness in this area. Like some European country(s) do with personal fines, afaik.

4gotunameagain 1y ago
Like the famous "Finnish businessman hit with €121,000 speeding fine" ! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-businessman-hit-with-121000-speeding-fine https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
- catlikesshrimp 1y ago
  And that is how you get to no traffic deaths in a year https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/27539-helsinki-records-zero-traffic-deaths-for-full-year.html https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
bko 1y ago
How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator? Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness. IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side
- Steve16384 1y ago
  > How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. I think the reasoning as that when Google does it, it affects far more people than if (say) I sold a single phone with only my own apps pre-installed. Should I be fined $55 million?

gitprolinux 1y ago

[dead]