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Comment by jackmaney | Hacker News Reader

> InMobi was subject to a $4 million civil penalty, which was lowered to $950,000 "based on the company's financial condition," the FTC said in a statement issued Wednesday, without elaborating.

Why should the penalty be reduced based upon InMobi's finances? If the fine bankrupts them, all the better!

Edit: Honestly, I don't know why companies can't be fined based upon a percentage of revenue taken over, say, the past year. A fine of 10% yearly revenue would actually make these bastards sit up and pay attention.

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Revenue based fines aren't necessarily always going to be fair because some companies focus on revenue more than others, and it's not fair to penalize them for that.

My guess as to why they lowered the fine is because the FTC doesn't want to appear as though they are deliberately bankrupting companies in efforts to simply make them go away. Things could get way too political at that point, and people could start trying to influence the FTC to bankrupt their competition.

What is the difference between stealing money from one's pocket/locker, and stealing information about someone? In both cases, one is doing it for profit. The only difference is that in the latter, you utilize the information to make money.

The amount of fine appears ridiculous. The FTC might as well could come out and say that there's no violation here as we do not want to appear as being on a witchhunt.

If a company loses money doing something illegal they should be punished less?

> "based on the company's financial condition,"

Irony is that the company does this in order to "improve it's financial condition".

>If the fine bankrupts them, all the better!

What were your thoughts on the RIAA bankrupting people by suing them for $250k/song pirated? All for the better, right?

The difference being that people "pirating" means (typically) that they're downloading for personal use, not for the purpose of generating revenue or profit.

These companies are getting slaps on the wrist for illegal behaviour and can simply consider it a cost of doing business unless the incentives change, eg unless the proceeds of the crime are stripped from them with additional punitive damages.

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