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Comment by badpun | Hacker News Reader

It's not "Google" (corporations don't exist in the physical world, so they can't act in it), it was specific people at Google who destroyed evidence or lied to court.

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It is Google and inside Google some specific individuals. Corporations are part of the society and their capital is its representation.

Corporations have to be liable and whoever takes benefits has to take this.

Yeah, side note we need corporate death penalty

Isn't that what happened to SVB?

That was more like a public lynching

No, SVB failed as a result of a bank run. What OP is suggesting is more akin to Arthur Andersen after Enron.

Antitrust is akin to this, with corporations being split into much smaller and way less powerful entities - it happened to AT&T, and Microsoft was close to getting sentenced as well in 1990s.

Individuals need to be punished if they do something evil.

It's too easy to hide behind your corporation/business when your company ends up doing some serious environmental disaster.

Google the company shouldn't be used as a mask for individual Google employees. If you find that employees are being used as scapegoats for companies, it's an indication that you haven't moved high enough in the org chart with your indictments.

But when things go right, Google reaps most of the benefits, individuals just get a small piece of the pie. But when things go wrong, you want to blame the individuals instead of the group?

It's the American way.

He left Russia for freedom and the American way, and he got Franz Kafka and Goldman Sachs. - Flash Boys

What does it mean when "Google reaps most of the benefits"? How does that manifest if not as individual gain?

I'm pretty sure those with equity in google get exactly what google makes redistributed to them, minus taxes and whatever they choose to reinvest in the company.

Not Google. Owners of Google - so, specific people again.

The point of a corporation is to be a legal person that is considered as a physical person in various ways for purposes of a lawsuit.

That's literally why it has the Latin root corp, meaning body, in the name.

Perhaps the solution then is to identify every individual who chose to keep chat history off despite awareness of the litigation hold (particularly those where evidence exists here showing it was an intentional choice), charge them with contempt of court, and put them in jail for a year or so. It's a crime, you can get jail time for it, and if you do it enough times, people will pay attention to it.

Items 30-32 (from p. 9) seem pretty significant. Basically, other stuff like Gmail automatically went on litigation hold (where records are preserved), but Chat didn't. Google did warn employee about the problem with this and told them not to use Chat for any topics subject to litigation hold. But they left it up to employees to actually do that.

And, very predictably, of course they didn't. Whether it's because they were careless, unaware, intentionally trying to hide things is another question. Regardless, it was an arrangement that basically guaranteed this sort of problem would happen.

Corporations don't exist in the physical world, so they can't act in it

They very much exist in the legal world, and are accountable for the actions of employees acting under their direction.

According to, you know, those fussy pieces of paper that their owners signed (and presumably read) when they agreed to incorporate.

Corporations are responsible for the actions of those they employ.

If google publishes an option to press a button to violate the law to its employees, they are responsible for those that chose to click it.

Reminds of the infamous Mitt Romney quote "Corporations are people".

Then why does "Google" get tax benefits and not individuals?

Why do corporation pay taxes is a good question in the first place. The same income is taxed twice - at corporate level first, and then when dividends are paid out (or, in case of buybacks, when shareholders give back their shares to Google in exchange for the profit that was already taxed). From what I've seen at my very cursory look at taxation policy textbooks, the official policy is that taxes don't have to make sense or be fair. They just have to be accepted enough by the population to not stir up trouble, and raise enough money for state to function. Hence the double taxation of corporate profits.

Let's imagine that I, without acting as a business, took income for work and then paid other people to do the work. All of that income would get double taxed, not just the profit. Corporations get a huge tax benefit compared to individuals. Imagine if you could deduct cost of living from your income tax.

Also a lot of that money only gets taxed the second time as capital gains, so while it's taxed twice it's two very discount taxes.

A few bad apples. A few bad cops. A few bad prison guards.

Everyone is guilty of something. So is no one guilty of anything?

The last part goes:

If everyone is guilty of something then politics and power decide who gets punished.

What’s funny about this take is I can’t tell if it’s super leftist and “lock up the bankers” or super capitalist and “we will never know show did this”.

Schrödinger's Comment

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