It's a QoS problem - if you only scheduled processing by magnitude of alleged offense, people would optimize their behavior against the tradeoff between scale of offense and likelihood that they get to it in the queue before the statute of limitations expired, and then you end up needing to build a more complicated tiering system if you want anything below that threshold to be a rule followed at all.

(Yes, people do this anyway at differing levels, from betting they won't get charged with jaywalking to betting prosecuting/defending companies won't show to small claims to ..., but purely ordering by alleged damages would give a much stronger guarantee of whether crimes actually got charged, and thus whether you could safely assume you'd get away with them.)

Consider also: if you have a priority system with no disincentive to falsely inflating priority, then people will optimize for whatever matters to them getting done, e.g. finding ways to inflate the priority.

> ...less damaging to society?

Sorry for the nitpick, but this part really irks me. It could only be true if you define "society" as "people in the US".

American ISPs target American citizens. Google targets pretty much everyone who uses the Internet, regardless of their country. Of course, it's understandable that the US justice system only targets people in the US, so I'm only being nitpicky because you've used the term "society" there. American ISPs, regardless of how shitty they might be, will never be more damaging to the society than a company that impacts the whole world.