Apparently, "three strikes and you're out" only applies to individuals, who with a repeat offense of this magnitude would have their lives destroyed by the justice system, and get locked away for a decade or more.
In a company with as many independent lines of business as Google has it's possible to have multiple instances of anti-trust enforcement that don't look like "we already fined you but you're continuing with the prohibited behavior", and the Android, Ads, and Shopping cases do all look really different. Plus they're covering overlapping time periods, which limits how much the regulator can say "you should have listened to us before".
(Disclosure: I used to work at Google)
There's even judges who love baseball so much they quote it in opinions lol.
I don't know enough about New Zealand politics to know if those parties have a chance of actually doing so.
[1] I say sadly, less because I like the current government, and more because they seem desperate to import Bannon-esque culture war nonsense like attacking women's rights.
> Under RICO, a person who has committed "at least two acts of racketeering activity" drawn from a list of 35 crimes (27 federal crimes and eight state crimes) within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering if such acts are related in one of four specified ways to an "enterprise." Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count. In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through a pattern of "racketeering activity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
The Wikipedia article also lists a few famous cases.
And not even to all criminal charges. Three strike laws usually apply only to felonies.
Do you mean "too difficult" or "too bigger punishment"? Either way, I disagree. If they reap the reward of huge salaries, they ought to take some of the risks.
... but I suppose you're right about more mundane, non-government-sanctioned crimes.
The cost of going after those companies is ridiculous already, once they are proven guilty, it would be simpler if we could punish the company as a person, than to find a real person to punish. After all, companies are very happy to be persons for other legal purposes.
Make it illegal not to have a "custody trace" of how a decision came to be. Even if the CEO came up with it in the shower, for the thing to be implemented, it has to come across a lot of individuals. Make them having to keep all of that data around, and required to disclose how something came to be in case it's revealed as unlawful.
No, what should instead be done is prevent the existence of these megacorporations which have disproportionate influence on humanity in the first place. Prevent them to form and chop up the existing ones aggressively into smaller ones.
Guilt by association is not acceptable in a first world country. You don't go to jail if your brother commits a crime, you shouldn't go to jail if your company commits a crime. You only go to jail if you commit a crime.
Staw man. The only way that is comparable is if you oversaw your brothers career and received part of his income... if he then committed a crime (from which you benefited), then yes, you could be held part accountable.
Execs are not merely "associated", they are responsible and receive excessive compensation directly derived from the actions of the organisation they oversee. If a corporate crime is committed on their watch they could be held accountable, if not through direct involvement, through negligence - allowing it to take place by not exerting enough oversight or management... to say otherwise would be similar to allowing people to drive cars negligently killing people without consequence, the analogy is not exact, since the car (the organisation) is not purely mechanical and has some degree of autonomy which is where these matters are not cut and dry, and those would be the finer points of a case exploring whether an individual subverted reasonable oversight or not - in the inexact analogy you could say, whether one of the wheels decided to ignore instructions, or whether the driver (exec) wasn't event bothering to steer.
Companies would then have to get their things in order quickly, and win back the trust. A very effective deterrent.
Imagine Google being out of the EU market for 3 months. How many youtubers would try and publish their videos on other plateforms? That would open competitions. People would boo google everytime they suck because they would fear for themself.
It would create pain right now, but a sane pressure that would force companies to stop playing with fire because they know they can't get a bad burn.
The world could tolerate YouTube being gone for a while.
What about Android though? Is the entire world supposed to replace their phone while Play Services are down, and Android isn't getting security updates?
What about GCP? How many businesses are also going to be shut down when GCP suddenly stops working? They might migrate, but that's not something you can do overnight.
What about Gmail? Email communications would be shattered for a while, since so many people will need a new email provider and will have to distribute that out. God forbid anyone forgot their password and can't reset it because Gmail doesn't work.
What about G Suite? Do all these other businesses just suddenly lose access to their documents? That would royally screw a lot of businesses.
You can't "just" shut down Google without a whole host of second-order effects.
so too big to fail. Like with banks, they should be allowed to do anything with impunity and we should use taxpayer money to bail them out when they fuck up?
E.g. we could simply seize all profits for 3 months, so Google sees no profit but the world can keep spinning. We could fine them a % of their cash holdings, if we wanted to. We could force them to split off lines of business so we don't have to worry about a catastrophic failure if we do need to kill the whole business.
I just don't think suddenly shutting them down is the right move. There are ways to punish them with far less collateral damage.
What do you think inflation is ? Their externalities being taxed on the population. Since we have to pay no matter what, at least they should feel it too.
This is probably still a multi-billion dollar cost when spread across the economy. There are going to be tens of thousands of workers who now have to work on migrating off Gmail/GCP/GSuite rather than doing anything actually productive. A migration like that is usually a multi-year effort, involving huge man-hour expenditures.
We could just set a fine equal to their profit for X months and accomplish roughly the same thing without upending half the businesses in the world.
> What do you think inflation is ? Their externalities being taxed on the population. Since we have to pay no matter what, at least they should feel it too.
Inflation is a decrease in the value of currency, and the causes are not well-understood. Pinning it on Google is pretty spurious. We had low inflation through years of Google doing shady things. I can't ascribe a cause to inflation, but I can pretty confidently say that Google doing shady things isn't the major cause.
That would immediately force them to comply.
Edit: Although looking at that and this fine, if you own $1000 of google shares, you would owe $3…
That would be a complete detriment to one of the greatest innovations in financing: Seperation of capital and responsibility. When you buy a stock you know you can not loose more than the stocks value, so you dare to invest.
Also, would bond holders also be burdened with this? what about derivatives?
You invest in bad actors and want to make money with it? Well you should pay the consequences for that.
Unless you fine the company enough for it to go into bankruptcy in which case the shareholders are protected by limited liability and the creditors take the hit instead. But the bankruptcy angle is completely irrelevant to this case, none of the fines considered are close yo bankrupting Google.
If a country violates international sanctions, should I be sent to The Hauge because I have bonds tied to the bridges and roads being built by that government?
To put it another way: If a restaurant is shut down for health code violations found in the kitchen, should the valet be lectured about proper food preparation?
Realistically speaking, I don't see many politicians supporting this kind of change. I'm not even thinking of the issues around corruption, but merely the knowledge that hurting that company would in turn, also impact their own economy in the process.
Imagine if no business of a nation were searchable in Google for a 4 year period. It would be devastating.
Similarly, there are a lot of physical consequences to consider as well. If you lock out a company like Apple or Coke from operating in a country, suddenly there are a lot of related issues.
If Apple could not operate in a specific nation for a set amount of time, suddenly any stores they have would presumably be closed. This would impact customers ability to get their devices repaired. I would also have to assume that all employees at each of those locations would be fired, leaving a sudden glut of unemployment, impacting people who had nothing to do with the situation.
If Coke were to be banned for some set amount of time, it would make a lot of weird cases around things like Vending Machines and Grocery stores. The company might not be marketing or selling their products to distributors, but those distributors might still be selling that product. Once their stock ran out, if they were to attempt to purchase more from the company in a nearby country, who would be at fault? Coke, or the distributor?
I imagine it would create a ton of issues with other things, like agreements to pay X amount of money over time. Stock trading would be another big one, not just in individual stocks, but in mutual funds and ETFs that might be heavily invested in that company. In one sense, it might make investors and day traders more weary and discerning from who they decide to trade with, but trying to figure out which company is breaking which laws, and how likely they are to get caught doing it, is practically impossible to determine, without inside knowledge on the matter.
What would that even mean? If you aren't allowed to participate in the Maps business for, let's say, 2 years, does that mean you cannot offer the app for download? Then everybody stays on the old version, and cannot install security updates.
Or that you cannot offer it as a new install? Then people changing their phones are screwed.
Or that you cannot offer new maps? Then people rely on the old ones, running into permanently closed roads.
Or that your servers must immediately stop serving map tiles? Customer's won't be very happy about that either.
That you cannot make any revenue from the service? Kinda hard to do when your service is maps, but the revenue source is ads.
And so on, ad infinitum.
Consumers tend to switch apps pretty quickly, but what about b2b software? Switching over to a database from another vendor can easily be a 3 to 5 years project, so it's likely that many customers would simply sit out such a jail time.
I would love this, but there are so many irritating practical problems with it that I'd prefer we expand the cases where we can "pierce the corporate veil"; we should absolutely shield people from personal liability from good-faith failures when we work for a company, but when we see fraud, wage theft, and so on, we should be a great deal more willing to chase personal liability for decision-makers.
Something that's driven a big change in safety culture in New Zealand was allowing certain types of health and safety prosecutions to proceed against individuals, so that (for example) a site manager who decides that start-of-day hazard briefings on a building site are a waste of 15 minutes can be fined or even imprisoned if someone ends up hurt as a result.