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Comment by heymijo | Hacker News Reader

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...

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 Like the google maps trademark is no longer valid in Australia and google must stop using it immediately.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

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.

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...

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