Not to mention that most companies seem to get off with nothing more than a slap-on-the-wrist type fine, if at all. It seems as if it's just become a cost of doing business.
clearly that's not what they want. they want less anti-competitive practices and they want them quickly. a massive fine that brings in some public money and punishes them for past actions is a nice upside
I wish, the bigger the company, the smaller the fines (proportionally) tend to be. Like slapping Google on the wrist with a $125m fine. "oh no, an amount we can make back in about an hour, whatever shall we do!"
Good. Maybe that will make them think twice about doing something illegal just because they can afford the fine.
For too long to meant companies and people in business have avoided the consequence of their actions, it's time we pulled them back into line.
The issue is the fines aren't a big deterrence as they're not that big. A lot of fines are less than the money the company made or saved with the illicit activity so it just becomes a line item cost more than an actual penalty.
Fines should be a deterrent and not just cost of business. It seems we have reached a point where large companies can do shady stuff, make lots of money, pay a fraction of that as fine and nothing else happens. So they will keep doing it.
This is a very defeatist view of things. The purpose of fines is not to destroy a company, it's to correct its bad behavior - if they keep doing it you can fine them again for even more money.
I'm in two minds with these kinds of fines (maybe not super relevant for this specific fine).
1. Do these big megacorps just not care about rules, and they look at fines as a cost of doing business while the steam roll through industries.
2. Have lawmakers completely failed for the past decades to effectively referee tech, and so instead of having sane regulation and clear rules everything has to get decided in courts with fines.
Probably both are true, and the real losers are small businesses trying to get started.
Any settlement which allows the company to only pay a fine and not admit wrongdoing is not a deterrent against future wrongdoing. The fine nearly always is far outweighed by the profit. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that the potential for fines are part of the product planning process.
The fines are not to claw back damages, they are a deterrent for the company to stop the behaviour with the idea if they don't stop those fines will keep happening with increasing amounts.
Yes, and how does a $5B fine not accomplish that? It's not like any smaller company can look at this and say "well, the total valuation of all firms pursuing these activities is larger than the fine, so it's rational to continue doing that". By all means, fine every company that does this $5B, though.
5% is pocket money. By the time the get sued, lose, appeal, lose the appeal, etc. they'll have made that money many times over. At this scale fines are just the cost of doing business.
The only way to act as an actual deterrent is to put executives behind bars or dismantle the company.
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