$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
It is. But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute. [0]
Prosecuting that would have lead to a dangerous precedent for a lot of companies and government agencies involved in propaganda.
Propaganda (a.k.a , advertising/marketing) is broadly legal (though some specific methods and certain actors participating in certain kinds are restricted), deliberately making materially false statements to the government in the course of, and in order to influence, a government proceeding is prohibited. Firmly drawing the line between those things is a good thing.
This is only trumped by by sovereign immunity, for starting wars or oil spills or releasing viruses or whatever. "Bush is gone, let's move on - why are you still on that?"
State Power is great isn't it?
"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
Stock ownership is rewarding because it's risky. Let it be risky.
Which is generally why responsibility stops with the board of directors, because there’s no way there was criminal intent through four layers of indirection. (Except shell companies, of course.)
In principle though, I think partial ownership of a harmful company should expose you to some liability, whether or not the CEO listens to you.
People seem to not realize this.
We should undo it. It was a mistake
C-corps have limited liability (now), but piercing is much easier for bad acts, and they have lots of regulation and formality (historically) that helped prevent bad acts in the first place.
The LLC changed a lot here - you could form businesses basically structured any way you want, with almost no regulations, and still not be liable. Outside of constructing an LLC to do totally illegal things (like rob banks or something), you and your shareholders are pretty much never liable.
That is definitely not true of C-corps, and was even less true historically :)
For limited liability in general: General forms of limited liability are about 100-150 years old, depending on country. IE before 1850, it was pretty rare. I believe new york has an earlier statute, but it was uncommon.
LLC's are not corporations, either, under most state law, they are special forms of companies.
The alternative mind you, was sometimes double liability for shareholders, who both lost their investments, and had to pay for excess loss.
I'm actually okay with that - it's a good way to ensure better diligence and less risk.
It's true that LLC's enabled innovation that would have been slower, but at a tremendous cost - enabling almost any risk to be taken for free is to me, a lot worse than slower innovation. It also lead to totally perverse things (toxic dumping, etc) and shareholders didn't worry or care because at most they lost some of their investment, and most of the time, could easily pull it out before the shares dropped, and move on to investing in the next horrible thing. In the old world, they would have been responsible for the entire cost, even if they pulled out.
Limited liability is a bad idea as long as people can do horrible things to each other and the world faster than you can (or should) make them strictly illegal.
People can always think of horribly destructive ways to make money, and ensuring not just personal, but shareholder liability for them, is one of the only ways to keep things in check.
These things would happen a lot less if the ROI was not as high, and in particular, if downside risk was not minimal.
Your friendly billionaire is going to invest a lot less in arms dealers if the downside risk is not just their 1 million investment, but their entire fortune.
There are lots of good articles on this:
https://www.bus.umich.edu/KresgeLibrary/resources/abla/abld_...
https://www.occ.gov/publications-and-resources/publications/...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-instituti...
etc
It’s exactly similar to everyone who participated in a pyramid scheme is liable for the last round of victims. Up to you to get informed.
What if killing net neutrality was a given, but the administration wanted the appearance of due process…
God, I’ve grown jaded.
Anything remotely resembling this existed almost a decade ago in a very different landscape, and what you're saying isn't even really reflective of the reality at the time. The vast majority of reasonable people were talking about what would gradually happen if the concept of net neutrality was totally thrown out; in the interim both sides have constructed more nuance, there is more public awareness, more partisanship, and thus different goalposts being fought over.
Now we have a ruling that the FCC can't limit state net neutrality law, because Verizon was literally fucking THROTTLING FIREFIGHTERS DURING A MAJOR WILDFIRE. Less "fast lane," more "death lane." ISPs know that the current environment won't tolerate their unchecked fantasies.
Here are some sources for anybody who doesn't want to believe this happened:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle... https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/verizon-throttled-californi... https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/verizon-throttle-fir... https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/verizon-firefighter-data-s... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/verizon-explains-why-throttle...
Can you explain your analogy? I'm unclear if the aquifer is the ISP, the video platform, or something else.
It wasn't obvious whether the telcos were going to keep competing and improving or just become complacent as a cartel. Snowden's leaks were just about to be released. The distrust seemed very reasonable at the time.
In a few ways the "fast lane" idea did get implemented, but in terms of cost rather than the speed of access. Lots of bundles between telcos and streaming services exist now (i.e. Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, ESPN, YouTube TV, etc.).
Just because Netflix paid their providers, your local isp wants their cut as well.
- perhaps it includes auditing and reporting measures to ensure they aren't doing this things.
- maybe its really hard to guarantee exactly equal performance for all traffic and they examine the traffic and do different things depending on the domain to balance loads
No, there's no collusion here. These are just state laws that are insufficient to compel the behavior we want. She got what she could and called it a victory. But a very progressive AG is clearly not in the pocket of the internet content industry.
An almost absurd question, but would it be possible to add love to company interactions?
A company might emulate love, but it’s really just veiled manipulation.
Then factor time:
1000000000000÷12÷30÷24÷60÷60
Somebody is making $32k profit per second. Who? That's about 5% margin/tax on $615k, so yeah, it's happening per second.
No fine has ever been a threat to any company. The entire system is such a joke.
More consequences are due.
These are not big operations, they were charging 7c a "lead", so each company made ~100k, and the CEO was running the script to send fake data himself.
Justice was served.