The ratio of market cap differences is about 34:1. If Facebook's fine is adjusted to Equifax's it would be a $22.1B fine instead of $5B.
So, from a market cap perspective Equifax's fine is ~4x Facebook's.
If you cause $100 in damages, you pay $100 (plus any punitive awards). Doesn't matter what your shares happen to be trading at that day.
It seems less scofflaw companies aren't offered the chance to serve the same markets because criminal companies are let off too lightly.
A fine is meant to deter as well as punish. If the fine is too small, it won't deter. And certainly if less than the profits earned, it can't punish, nor deter.
Losing $650 million is perhaps not quite as compelling a story as losing billions, or a smoking hole where a company used to be (as in Enron and Arthur Andersen). But it's a pretty big chunk of change. I have no experience making such arguments, but it seems plausible that it will be remembered for a while at Equifax and their competitors, at least?
I'm doubtful that people respond to such incentives rationally. It probably has more to do with how well the storyteller tells the story. And whether the thing they're selling actually works well for improving security seems pretty hit-and-miss, too.
Primarily, I want my justice system to administer justice.
Which doesn't make any sense and just gives them the incentive to play the same games they do in avoiding taxes.
The first reason it doesn't make sense is that the penalty should have some relation to the damages. If you cause $500 damage to someone else without their consent, screw you. But if the fine for that is $5000 per victim, it's a deterrent no matter how big you are, because $5000 is more than $500 (and provides a fair margin for the probability of not getting caught), and if the company is getting more than $500 in value from doing it then it could have just offered to pay the victim $501 to consent to allowing it, which implies that they're not.
Meanwhile if you don't think large corporations can move numbers around on a spreadsheet to minimize what they owe, you haven't been paying attention. And we sure as heck don't need a system where Equifax gets to put its risky business in one entity that has inconsequential revenues and then suffer a $10 total fine when it screws up this bad because whatever penalty percentage of almost nothing rounds to zero.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm not advocating one particular method of coming up with this number. I'm just saying that the fine should depend on the company, not be a flat number based on damages caused.
If you don't do it this way, you end up in a situation similar to speeding tickets: well-off people don't care at all (and are even probably more annoyed about having their drive interrupted than the actual fine), but it can mean a poor person has to skip meals to recover. If the goal is discouraging a certain type of behavior overall, it has to hurt violators comparably, no matter their wealth.
I would believe that if these companies didn't just keep doing what they were doing anyway. Losing a percentage of revenue or profit for one year does nothing to deter them! We need to reinstate the corporate death penalty. Equifax deserves to die for its negligence, IMO.
The only way things will change is if the fines hurt more, but it needs to hurt the huge companies just as much as the small ones, otherwise it ends up just being another factor that helps keep the already-dominant companies at the top.
Facebook's stock went up because they had a pending fine, and the value of the fine was announced, reducing uncertainty. Put another way, would you buy a car that has an unknown repair bill for the same price as a car you know how much it's going to cost to fix?