I want FTC to put fear of god in bad actors like GoodRx. $1.5 million is pocket change for a company with $765 million annual revenue. They've spent $400k just on lobbying. This isn't gonna change anything.
I’m not sure I do. The FTC does civil enforcement and investigation. They identify misbehavior and issue the equivalent of parking tickets. If you also give them the ability to issue punishments then what prevents the FTC from using that power to line their own pockets by sabotaging (or threaten to sabotage) well behaved companies?
This penalty may not preclude lawsuits by GoodRx customers or further investigations by other organizations leading to criminal penalties.
I’m not a lawyer so I could be totally off base here but this is my understanding after dozens of these HN threads with similar comments.
> $1.5 million is pocket change for a company with $765 million annual revenue.
Is it? GoodRx hasn’t turned a profit since 2019. They lost $32.8 million on $766.5 million in revenue in 2022.
But, it probably isn't enough to prevent other bad actors. Or from GoodRx re-offending in a few years, once the CEO/BoD/etc have rotated on to other pursuits.
Well-behaved companies won't line their own pockets out of fear that the FTC will sue them out of existence.
I edited that sentence to try and clarify.
> If you also give them the ability to issue punishments then what prevents them from using that power to sabotage (or threaten to sabotage) well behaved companies to line their own pockets?
"Own pockets" - FTC is not a for profit company. GoodRx is a for profit company. Companies have more to gain by acting in bad faith than FTC. So I would trust FTC any given day over a for profit company.
> GoodRx hasn’t turned a profit since 2019
This doesn't necessarily mean company is in bad shape. This happens when company is investing in growth at the cost of profit margins during it's initial years. If they can shell out half million dollars on lobbying then $1.5 million is indeed a pocket change for them.
As with class action suites, big companies have armies of lawyers to fight such cases for ages and ultimately the victims tend to settle for less because they can’t afford to fight forever.
Armies of lawyers aren't free and even if the victims don't get paid the lawyers do. It still costs the company money, a lot more than this settlement.
As regards to the accurate number I don't have any, but it should definitely not be this low.
We could start at whatever they charged their customers for the data. Not whatever the profit may have been, the sum of the invoices.
Proportionality, also means that if you have less to give, you give less.