Hacker News Reader

Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

They need to make people responsible, not the corporate entity.

Bollocks. The company as an entity played naughty, so it should, as an entity, get punished. Otherwise the stakeholders get a free ride.

There's two aspects

1) Punishing those that did the illegal thing

2) Punishing those that profited from the illegal thing

If a mafia boss profits from getting a goon to rough up a shop owner for protection money, both the goon and the boss are punished.

Why? The company profited from the crime. That would create some interesting incentives.

So what you're saying is that whenever i commit a crime i just need to do it under a business name and it's all good? It's simply ridiculous to think that.

And people profited frim the crime too. Both should be held responsible.

You can’t effectively punish a company, especially not a company the size of Facebook.

But if individuals go to prison for their actions, people will be more careful how they act.

Corporate death penalty.

I wished that was meted out as a punishment much more often than it is done today. It is a very powerful message to send: these execs are not bankable because they caused all of their shareholders to lose money.

Not sure why this is downvoted as it brings up an interesting position. Why can't there be violations so severe that they force the corporation to be dissolved?

It happens, just less often than is probably healthy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/ny-nra-lawsuit-letitia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen

Because people will think twice before breaking the law if they can be personally held responsible and potentially even go to jail.

Every facebook shareholder profited from it

Who? The lawyers who signed off on it? The PMs or engineers who followed the legal advice?

PMs as they are responsible. Go after the lawyers licease if you will.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com