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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I've seen this headline a hundred times in the past 5 years.

Probably because the cases in question started in 2017. The headlines we see are the percolation of these three cases through the entire appeals and resolution process.

Note Google still has the option of appealing to EU's top court, so the appeals process isn't even necessarily done I'm this case.

I hope they do and that the fine gets doubled as a result. Companies always appealing to the highest courts is only a function of the amount of cash they have, whatever happened to: "Judge says so, so that's it". It's just trying to do an end-run around the system by always clogging up the courts from low to high.

Honestly, just adding a market-rate interest charge on the original fine seems Good Enough to me. I suspect the interest on a $3B fine is larger than the court fees and lawyers anyways, and it's not like time value of money isn't something companies will neglect to take into account.

Wasn't the market-rate interest actually negative in some European countries in recent years?

There has to be some mechanism for some additional cost for the defendants to prevent appealing all court decisions...

If the interest was negative, then paying the money now is additional cost compared to paying it years ago.

TOTs....

An where have thesse 'fines' resulted in anything beneficial to human society.

THe title *SHOULD* read:

Google forced to fund N schools in Germany for fucking up.

But no,

In ALL of any of these 'fine-ings' can we have a document of where the fines were applied and what they accomplished?

> THe title SHOULD read:

That would only give them another way to put a positive spin on their anti competitive behavior.

The fines shouldn't be tied to anything. The point of fines is to punish bad behavior. The fine is the incentive to change behavior. I don't want fines being tied to specific rewards for a subset of society or a special interest. Once you start doing that, the incentives are broken. The benefit to society is that Google changes their behavior to avoid being fined again. The money should go into general government funding, not to "schools" or any other specific thing.

Legislation is often changed so as to target big companies in the industry du jour. Just look at how tenuous many of the prosecutions in France of Google are. They aren't aimed at market fairness even remotely, but to extract wealth to the state.

It's particularly noticeable because the regulations selectively enforced are usually a huge hindrance to market entrants.

> Google [...] market entrants

How did you draw a line from the former to the latter?

I believe the parent was referring to things like GDPR which may have the unintended consequence of more entrenching the large incumbents because of the cost and time associated with compliance.

The cost of compliance with GDPR is only high if you want to straddle the line of what is or isn’t acceptable behavior regarding saving user data and monetizing said data. Lawyers are expensive, and the more crooked you are, the more expensive they get. If, on the other hand, you don’t want to save any data on your users more than you obviously need (in order to do what your users explicitly ask for), then the cost is zero – you are already compliant.

This is just wrong. The cost of DSARs to most businesses who are subject to GDPR fines is massive.

Then store less customer data. You're complaining that being data leech is expensive because of the GDPR. That's the point.

Europeans don't want you to keep that much data on them. If your business model requires that, it is not one we want to encourage.

You can send them the json for their user page and a copy of your user data policies. This process can easily be automated with an url. This doesn't cost more to do than any other form of customer support.

I think the point the grandparent is making is that for a corporation, a fine is the price of bad behavior. Corporations don't make moral judgments between good and bad; as far as the company is concerned, they will make $X of profit from the behavior and it will cost $Y in fines, and if $X > $Y they will keep doing it. So for fines less than the profitability of the behavior, governments should just think of them as taxes, revenue-generation sources from continuing to allow the corporation to do whatever it's being fined for.

... and that's why the EU has high fines for shit like this, to make sure $Y > $X.

It's also why tech companies keep complaining about EU regulators.

That's ludicrous. It should go back into the governing bodies who do this to hire more auditors and investigators and lawyers to do even more of the Lord's work.

On the other hand, wouldn't mind if my taxes had some allocation I could attitude to them

I'm wondering what the effect would be if the money from the fines is burned (destroyed).

The company would still feel the same incentive. For the government on the other hand, it removes the incentive to fine for one's own gain. I like that it would remove this conflict of interest.

By removing the money, it's essentially very slightly reducing inflation.

Actually that can be quite an equitable way of distributing the fines (to all people holding the currency in question).

While in theory this sounds nice, in practice it means everyone gets nothing. It's a rare case where I'd rather see the government get money. A comparable scenario is a class-action lawsuit; a company might lose a billion dollar class action lawsuit, but what that means is a third goes to lawyers, a third goes to administrative overhead, and the remaining third is distributed to the plaintiffs as a bunch of checks for 50 cents a piece (and then they're taxed on it!). I'd rather the government get one big check.

Hmmm...

>>While in theory this sounds nice, in practice it means everyone gets nothing.

im trying to find out where anyone got something?

> In ALL of any of these 'fine-ings' can we have a document of where the fines were applied and what they accomplished?

Usually, this is impossible, because fines are tossed into a large pool of fungible money which is periodically allocated, but the allocation isn’t done per individual fine.

Of course, the budget which applies to the fund involved is usually public, so insofar as it is approximately and imprecisely (in relation to a specific fine) possible, it is already done routinely.

This money should be fed back into the regulatory system to provide fund for expanding audits of these companies which are clearly out of control. Corporations are basically entities without morals. They only care about the legality of situations and interpretations thereof that their lawyers think they can get away with so as much oversight as possible would be great.

This sets up the worst incentives. Regulators would get paid by the fines they extract, so it would be in their benefit to chase any lawsuit against FAANGs, no matter how tenuous, while letting the 99.99% of other companies run amok because they wouldn't result in the billion dollar paydays.

What we have right now is only half way working why not give it ample funds to fix it? We have judges to decide if a government dept is overstepping its bounds. To always say "bureaucracy is bad, always" is not a very good tautology.

This is just dumb. Would you prefer if executives were sent to prison? These fines are beneficial in the way that business might think twice before fucking over people.

> Would you prefer if executives were sent to prison

Actually that'd be great for serious transgressions. They're at the helm, they make decisions, they reap the rewards, why shouldn't they also be punished when the company fucks up seriously?

Anti-trust isn't a crime. And there are reasons for that other than what cynicism suggests. It is far more difficult to pin down the definition, for example, than it is even for typical white-collar crimes (fraud etc.). And it's morally dubious to punish someone in unpredictable ways. (the (civil(!) anti-trust fines don't create new harm, but are intended to fix a situation, which makes them more acceptable. As an analogy: when someone damages your car and has to pay for repairs, that payment is zero-sum for society. if you hit him in the head, that's a net-negative because you (shouldn't/don't) derive as much benefit from it as they are harmed)

Then, practically speaking, the groups involved are simply too large to pin outcomes on individuals, and we don't do guilt-by-association. The timescales are also wrong, because the people responsible will often have moved on long ago. And the people usually do not participate in the spoils anywhere close to linearly with their involvement (which is a good thing because it prevents most corporate malfeasance: you aren't going expose yourself to moral and criminal guilt at a 9-5 job).

Also,, the standard-of-proof that is required is higher ("beyond reasonable doubt", i. e. 95%) than it is in civil cases ("preponderance of evidence", i. e. 50%). This is an outcrop of that moral-guilt vs responsibility thing from above, and also from the fact that in civil court it's often arbitrary what side of the courtroom you end up on.

I'm not talking about anti-trust per se, even though i think egregious cases still deserve serious punishment.

I mean shitshows like Boeing, Equifax and similar. Where the company showed blatant disregard for safety and security, and it was really not a single person making a mistake, but big parts of the entity being rotten to the core. For such things, the executives should face consequences in the form of a combination of: go to prison for some time, face heavy fines against their personal wealth ( ideally proportional), and have bans on leading any commercial for some time afterwards.

The incentives are all wrong for everything below fraud ( Enron level). Boeing got away with literally manslaughter through criminal negligence, and what consequences where there? The CEO got a golden parachute, and a chief pilot got thrown under the bus. That will make them learn their lesson, right?

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