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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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