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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> these companies would get the corporate death penalty

Would suggest replacing this in your vocabulary with “fines,” “license revocation” or “criminal penalties.” Corporate death penalties, i.e. judicial dissolution or charter revocations, while a good slogan, don’t make a lot of legal sense. As a result, I’ve found it in practice used to segregate activism and turnout operations (who like it) from rule and lawmaking influence (where it’s not a serious concept).

Massive fines, equal to market cap, or absolute liability, e.g. a $10k + legal expenses minimum owed to each person whose data leaked irrespective of actual damages, for example, are more specific and actually actionable.

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I understand "corporate death penalty" as a dissolution of the corporation, likely with some cool down time for the execs found guilty when they cannot work as execs.

No violence should be involved. Large layoffs resulting from that won't be pleasant one bit though.

I'm pretty confident it wouldn't come to layoffs. If Meta faced such a risk they would simply follow the rule. Remember how many times they threatened to leave EU?

> dissolution of the corporation

Corporations are a legal fiction. What does dissolving the corporation mean? Revoking its charter? Then what happens to its assets? If you return them to shareholders, you’ve given a boon to its wealthiest, who can now re-organise it free of prior liabilities. If you liquidate them, you’ve delivered a junior fine, since with real fines the fine gets paid before creditors. If you take it, you’ve expropriated (also, fines with extra steps).

In every case, what you want from a “corporate death penalty” is better effected with actual penalties. A market-cap sized fine is more specific and more actionable than a “corporate death penalty,” which is why I suspect the latter is in circulation.

A corporation is an organisation. It has internal processes, both documented/formal, and undocumented/informal - 'the way we do things here'. There are teams and departments, and relationships between them. There are contracts and commitments to and from other organisations. Handshake deals. Unspoken agreements. Expectations around whose turn it is to get promoted. Culture. History. Group identity.

And sometimes these are bad and need to be dissolved.

How do you dissolve people's history and identity. Imprison them until they're reeducated?

I am not unsympathetic to your ultimate meaning. However...

Take everyone's favorite whipping boy, Facebook/Meta, as the example corporation. At every turn, they have shown that they have prioritized greed vs community good. Any good they provide is only to further their pursuit of wanting more. Because they are so large, any upstart competitor with a total opposite ethos that might come about gets annihilated by the behemoth.

If legal action were to give Meta the corporate death sentence preventing the company from operating and its execs from pivoting to somewhere else, then and only then could the competitors actually have a chance. So just because there's a death sentence for a corp doesn't mean the "people" lose as well.

> legal action were to give Meta the corporate death sentence preventing the company from operating and its execs from pivoting to somewhere else

Just do the second bit. The problem with judicial dissolution is corporations are a legal fiction. What you do with the people and assets is far, far more important. Ignoring the legal fiction to focus on those is my point. Take their stuff (fines). Force them to restructure (break-up). Limit their scope (corporate criminal penalties). Restrict their executives. “Corporate death penalty” is exactly non-specific enough to avoid specifying those prescriptions.

yes, but in coversation, are you going to list out those things every single time like that or are you going to do it once and then follow up with, "you know, the corporate death penalty?"

i don't think it's nearly as non-specific as you think. if you ask people what a corp death penalty would be, my assumption would be that people would think of it as the corporation no longer existing. if you're saying that corps would just spin off assets as a new name, new corp charter, same people, same processes, then yes, that would be a valid concern. but we can at least state that once, and all agree upon it rather than continuing to repeat it like we're unable to understand the concept.

> ask people what a corp death penalty would be, my assumption would be that people would think of it as the corporation no longer existing

I mean, look at this thread. I’m not saying the impulse is wrong. But “corporate death penalty” seems to be a good way to take a discussion which could lead to an outcome into one that won’t. That’s fine! People vent! But we shouldn’t confuse venting with deliberating.

I just can't wrap my head around what your issue is here. Only lawyers talk like this. Are you a lawyer? People feel a corporation has committed such wrong doing that they should no longer exist. When that happens as an individual, it is known as the death penalty. Applying that same phrasing to a corporation comes with the same understanding. You're pedantry in this case are quite trite

Not the person you're replying to, but I think the issue is that the individual vs. corporation analogy doesn't work. If you kill a person who has done bad things, you will indeed prevent that person from doing bad things in the future. If you kill a corporation (via legally dissolving its charter, the "corporate death penalty"), then you will not keep the individuals and investors associated with that corporation from doing bad things, as they will likely reorganize into a new entity and continue to do those bad things.

I agree that there's an element of pedantry there, so if (as the GP suggested), someone is just venting and doesn't care about a specific outcome, saying "give them the corporate death penalty" is fine. But the downside is that if someone reads that, and looks up legal corporate dissolution, they might get the wrong idea that this sort of remedy will actually fix the problem. Or they might not even do any research, and just decide to start throwing around this term themselves, without really understanding what it means or what it does (and doesn't) accomplish.

But I also agree that listing out other specific remedies (market-cap-sized fine, jailing executives, whatever) is long-winded and annoying, and maybe not really useful or relevant unless the discussion is actually about what specific remedies might be effective.

A corporate death penalty would be:

(1) Dissolution as a viable entity in the US

(2) All assets sold paid out to wronged parties before debt servicing or shareholders

(3) All officers barred from holding political, non-profit, or corporate office at any level in the US states or territories, as well as removing the veil of corporate liability from officers. All technology and security employees have liens put in place to pay affected parties as well.

When we mean death sentence, we mean it.

I'd agree except for fines.

If the fines are < the advantage to scoff the law, such a fine just puts a price tag that can be used in a cost-benefit calc for the company.

The fines should be to the shareholders. Ownership should be determined recursively to all actual humans. No trusts, no corporate owners, no funds.

A strawman: Maybe proportion of ownership times current assets and all future income. Whatever fraction of their financial being is proportional to their share of the corporation is "dead".

If you have X% ownership share, you are fined X% of all your current assets and X% of all future income.

A message needs to be sent that it's not okay to invest in a company that is doing harm and then walk away from it. You're ethically and morally liable, the law should reflect that.

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