With a fine per violation of $10,000 who cares? They say Meta did hundreds of them... so a few million dollars. What's that, two engineer years?
The AG identified 782 violations and requested treble damages [1]. That's $23mm right there, not including the state's legal costs (which are also trebled).
[1] https://agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/174_StatesMSJ.PDF
Washington requested and received injunctive relief [1]. Next steps would involve documented ongoing willful violation, getting a contempt of court ruling and then getting nasty with Facebook's assets and employees.
[1] https://agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/174_StatesMSJ.PDF
Allow courts to "fire"[1] high level managers and executives who either can be proven to have actual knowledge, or who should have known by nature of their position that the crimes were occurring, and who failed to take appropriate steps to try and prevent this from continuing to occur[1].
This would only apply for significant enough crimes, and only if the criminal nature of the action is clearly obvious (This is not some gray area where people could reasonably believe the actions are legal, even if it turns out not to be), or when person in question was clearly on notice that the actions are illegal such as from previous fines or similar enforcement action.
This has benefits over criminally prosecuting the people, since it allows ousting a person for severe incompetence in preventing crimes, even if the incompetence does not rise to the level of being criminal in itself. It is also better than really large fines which tend to actually punish the wrong people. (Big enough fines lead to layoffs, punishing the low level employees who may not be at fault. Big enough fines also tend to punish the shareholders, which for public companies often don't have anywhere near enough transparency into the workings of the company to know the crimes are occurring, and pressure the management/executives to fix things.). This generally makes it in management's personal best interests to actually investigate and stop crimes occurring within the company, rather than trying to brush it under the carpet or accepting fines as "the cost of doing business". After all, getting forced out of the company kinda hurts both their pride and their wallet.
[1] This "firing" would take the form of voiding the employment contract, enjoining the manager or executive from performing managerial/executive functions, enjoining the company from continuing to employ the individual, or from paying the person anything more than for time worked not already paid. (Specifically no severance, no executing golden parachute clauses, etc.)
[2] The nature of the crime, like OHSA violations might be pretty much impossible to completely prevent, and sometimes the person in question, might not have the authority to issue orders that could completely prevent the crime from continuing, but must have made reasonable efforts to get the person who does have the authority to to be aware and take actions.
I've always wondered if a sensible structure could be made to ensure that the fine is at minimum a few multiples of the possible benefit to the company. With advertising this is harder than say, falling trees.
e.g. we estimate your company generate revenues of X from this activity, so we set the fine at 10X. If you disagree with X, you can prove it with detailed, audited statements, and we will take 10 times that amount if we are convinced.
I’d be very much in favour of the “swiss model” for traffic fines - based on your income.
You did X wrong, here’s the set price from our catalogue vs. you did X wrong and based on your earnings, here’s what you owe.
If I do something very illegal to double my revenue, I've also doubled my fines.
Edit: To be clear my opinion is that FB should be forced to comply, by federal action if necessary. That their business depends on not taking responsibility for the messages they choose to amplify is their problem and they should be paying the cost of that.
...then they would be on a level playing field with everybody else. The alternative ("we don't care for some of these laws in some places we operate, so we decline to follow them") is what is generally referred to as a criminal enterprise.
If a 1000 (or 10k, or whatever) businesses in aggregate have a similar market cap and revenue to them while also following the rules then I fail to see how a single company has a problem with that. If it does then maybe splitting it up will make things easier...
But just in case you actually believe this should be convincing, consider how many tax jurisdictions Facebook does business in. Do you think they just ignore all those local rules?
Happens in government without any repercussions all the time. Washington state took ten years after being ordered by the state Supreme Court to fully fund education to actually do it.