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Comment by parhamn | Hacker News Reader

People say this frequently. Is this true? I always assume the fine establishes the illegal behavior and awareness of it for both parties and Google would be forced to correct the behavior regardless of the fine's size.

Were they to do it again or resume the behavior after the fine I assume the charges would escalate and eventually become criminal, hence companies curb their behaviors.

While this does create a 'get fined first' mentality, it does mean that good regulating could curb bad behavior. Am I wrong?

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Yes, recognizing fines as a cost of doing business is well recognized in corporate law.

These legal scholars even hypothesize that there might not be a big enough fine to deter illegal behavior from corporations. [0]

Your idea of escalating punishments doesn’t take into account corporate influence of legislation and regulatory capture.

[0] https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2020/03/18/the-cost-of-d...

The only punishment that works is to take away their brand.

Which is also an appropriate punishment given that brands are about trust.

I'm still in favor of throwing the CEO, CFO, Board of Directors and highly invested members of the Board of Investors in jail for grossly unethical business practices & gross privacy invasions.

That would annoy consumers more than it would hurt the business. Do you think people would stop buying the Apple iPhone if tomorrow it was called the Pear jPhone?

The name part of a brand is valuable, but it doesn't really define the brand, especially for huge brands like Google.

A bigger punishment perhaps would be if they allowed competitors to use the brand instead - if you could have Apple "Google Maps" and Bing "Google Maps" and OSM "Google Maps" for one of these cases, but that is even less realistic as a possible option.

How about: if a judge found that Google screwed their users then their trademark/logo is extended with a dagger symbol, which warns users about the company's behavior:

    Google†

And the next time they break the law, another dagger is added:

    Google††

After three daggers, the trademark is gone.

That would be interesting. Like the google maps trademark is no longer valid in Australia and google must stop using it immediately.

That would actually be a huge punishment.

Especially if they blocked the domain as well - maps.google.com

Don't have to look too far to see regulatory capture in action. Facebook pulled all news in Australia [0] to fight a (bad) link-tax legislation and "won". It was politically untenable.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-03-03/facebook-news...

"eventually become criminal"

They've been breaking the law for over a decade, has abyonw gone to jail?

And before someone says: "those instances were different law/etc", please remember that you will bot avoid jailtime if you rob the bank three different ways. Commiting crimes one after another makes sentences more aevere for an individual even if you broke totally different laws.

Haven't companies like Google been fined enough in the past alerady and despite that they have made little effort to conform to the data privacy measures? Instead they have enabled alternative ways for tracking (eg. recent FLOC debate). Once the right to privacy (online or otherwise) becomes fundamental, such violations of privacy, consciously or otherwise, by the private companies will fall into illegal activities prosecutable with imprisonment like it is done atm for insider trading and so on. This will create a substantial sense of responsibility in everyone working on any aspects of user data.

The lack of a direct way to measure how much profit in $$ a company made in the past decade because of a single privacy violation makes it an arduous task for prosecuting agencies to decide the amount of fines and/or prison time.

A multivariate regression using do-calculus might help, could be an interesting graduate project.

It is good that they were fined. But it is absurd that breaking law is not criminal if done for the first time and in sufficiently sophisticated way.

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