Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

I don't think TFA failed to differentiate revenue and profit, though. I think the point is these companies have enough revenue to pay off the fines, and 358 days to return to profitability for the year, even starting out with an operating loss.

I would be more surprised if HN didn't sprint to defend big tech, profit numbers are worthless because they can easily make those look however they want. Revenue is a much more useful indicator when looking at these giga corpos from the outside.

Agree. It's safe to ignore such articles. On the other hand, we'd do ourselves a disservice if we ignored: a fine is not a fine if it doesn't cause pain.

As it is, these relatively small fines to large companies are simply the cost of doing business. The behaviour does not change.

That is one field LLMs can disrupt for sure.

It's an illustration that encourages straight-up incorrect financial ideas (like revenue = profit). This is basic stuff.

I'm sorry but the moment you say "revenue is a more accurate depiction of a company's...profitability [than profit]" you've lost all credibility.

In what situations does a Capex hit the income statement?

I thought only depreciation or amortization would hit profitability.

OTOH, revenue can be made as large as possible to a limit.

IRS rules for capital expenditure can be followed and split over many years.

Once you reach a certain level of wealth, fines are no longer consequential. When you can restructure both your corporate and personal assets to span multiple countries with different regulations and poor cooperation, you've effective avoided them.

because they will make you (the end user) pay the bill by increasing prices?

I just prefer personal accountability because it seems a fair and just way to organize things. These things don't happen as a force of nature: it's someone (or a bunch of people) making a decision, and then someone (or several people) implementing it.

If I scam someone in my brick and mortar store with fake products I will be held personally responsible as the owner, and rightfully so. And if other people knowingly participate in the scam they will be held responsible too. Never mind all the other stuff like lying reviews, dangerous products, etc.

So why aren't we holding Jeff Bezos and the rest of Amazon leadership's team similarly accountable? They're not innocent bystanders here.

Somehow there's this idea that personal accountability just doesn't apply except in cases of VERY blatant outright fraud (Enron, VW Diesel, Theranos), and even then it's haphazard and often weak (no one went to prison for e.g. Deepwater Horizon). IMO it's one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas. The bigger the company (and thus stakes, and negative effects) the lower the accountability is.

The Devil's Dictionary from 1906 already observed this with:

"CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."

Because at a certain point, fines punish lower level workers rather than management. Furthermore, if the company is large enough, fining it to the extent that it collapses has material effects on the economy, which governments are incentivized to avoid. This isn't to say that there shouldn't be financial consequences for breaking the law -- of course there should. But management should also be thrown in prison when the company breaks the law, because they're in a position of responsibility (it's what they get paid for). Either they knew -- in which case they're personally liable -- or they didn't, in which case they're criminally negligent, and again, personally liable.

Yeah but is government really less corrupt than big tech?

Its very human to want a hero come save the day but I fear that we'd just be replacing one bad actor with another.

> Tech is supposed to fuck prices up. Google once upon a time did it for email, chat, video, search etc. I don't see why it can't happen with everything. We need grand goals not just how to add 6 more cameras into another fucking phone.

Which raises the question: Are these actually tech companies? Or simply 21st Century advertising (platform) companies - dependant on technology - whose primary goal is to exploit human nature for profit?

Abandon the idea that these are still tech companies and the world makes more sense (and gets more dystopian).

> Instead there are options:

Neither of these options are what has been commonly referred to as “piercing the corporate veil”: hold the shareholders accountable for the decisions of their hired executives. We’ve been talking about this exact issue so long that it has a name we’ve stopped using.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

If a company is being fined millions of dollars it’s likely because they made decisions which should reasonably land those responsible in prison.

> There is an endless supply of corporate robots to replace them.

If people will be held personally responsibly they have good incentives to not do this kind of stuff. Right now the incentive is exactly the other way: do anything to earn a profit and it will be good for your personal bank account. If it turns out some stuff was illegal, then well, not something that will be your problem as long as you didn't commit outright blatant fraud.

That Travis Uber guy may have fallen from grace somewhat, but he's still more wealthy than most of us will be, and part of why he's wealthy is because he knowingly (and very explicitly) broke a bunch of laws, never mind he resigned for reasons other than being a Uber's criminal activities.

> rather see a grassroots movement pushing to once again return to the marketplace of ideas, where for each "category" you have a host of apps competing against each other, not just one or two.

IMHO, what we need to return to is "free (provider choice) and competitive (provider price) access to the market."

E.g. what the internet and web originally were, which begat the current tech giants (including the modern versions of Microsoft and Apple) by allowing them to circumvent existing gatekeepers.

Which, critically, means removing the requirement to pay a tithe of your success (or attempt) to anyone.

Because that's where big tech is currently financially entrenched -- to be on our platforms (i.e. any used platform), you have to pay us.

Which leads to tails-you-lose-heads-I-win scenarios, which strategically block any future challenger from emerging, because they're sacrificing so much of their profit to existing gatekeepers.

The EU got their regulatory targets correct -- either you can be a gatekeeper, controlling access to a large number of users, and abide by heavy limitations on your ability to tax companies that go through you; or you can not be in a gatekeeper position and compete fully.

But you don't get to be a gatekeeper and do anything you want.

Because they do montages to make their local revenue unknowable. Through clever use of debt and licensing.

This SHOULD be the way as they are the ones who stand to gain the most. They should be the ones who lose the most if the actions of their responsibilities are nefarious.

That actually sounds like a remarkably elegant way to do it. We'll never know what the second order consequences could be until we try it. But I doubt they'll be as bad as what we're experiencing now.

No. That would destroy the stock markets in an instant. The way it has always been is that with a classic stock, the only risk an investor has is the money they paid someone to acquire the stock.

There exist other classes with actual post-buy liabilities, e.g. stock options, as one particularly unlucky poor sod discovered at the start of the 2020 plaguefest [1], but normally these are (supposed to be) heavily gated for actually qualified investors for precisely that reason.

Personally, I'd keep it that way... and nationalize companies that can't pay their fees, without paying out the shareholders. That way, the shareholders get punished, the jobs created by the company aren't lost, and the government gains something of value.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/17/20-y...

Fining shareholders would effectively force unlimited liability to shareholders, which comes with a bunch of negatives (ex: bigger shareholders would just own inside of an LLC wrapper).

Wouldn't fining more accomplish the same goal? If it was big enough, it would cause major drawdowns in the stock price, which would cause financial losses for the shareholders.

Our entire western society depends on the ability to own and run businesses without personal responsibility for what the business does as an organisation. Sometimes in the case of fraud, or similar individual crimes within an organisation can be placed as blame on individuals or even management found to wilfully ignore internal warnings and so on, but on the whole, it’s rare that we go after private persons for what the organisations where they work does.

Shareholders are even further detached from this process, often having very little knowledge of what happens within organisations. Often having no influence on what happens within organisations. You likely own stock yourself through your pension funds, and if you made these laws your pension would be fined for what the index fonds it invest in does.

I guess from some political points of views all of this would be a good thing based on our current inequality in society, but the way to solve this isn’t through collective punishment. It’s through taxation. Right now, the entire economy is very much geared in favour of increasing the inequality by transferring more and more wealth to those who already have it. It hasn’t always been like this, 50 years ago, before the age of new public management, the taxation on things like wealth, stock and so on were high and the wealthy in our society paid most 80% of their total (not income tax) wealth generation. Today it’s often less than 10-20% through various tax law loop holes, and that’s if you keep your wealth generation absolutely legal.

Af far as organisation fines go, the situation is sort of similar to the general economy, in that major organisations and wealth owners have “rigged” the system in ways where it’s very hard to punish major corporations on a global scale. In Denmark we might find Facebook or Google guilty of something and fine them up to 10% of their income, but its income in Denmark, which is frankly so small on the global scale that they often don’t even bother fighting it in our courts like they do with the larger EU rulings. This could change, but it’s hard to do so, as the US isn’t interested in forcing US non-token companies fines to foreign countries. Similarly it would seem that even within the US there is competition between the various states to be the most company friendly.

Where do you think the money comes from? The organization has some money they can either use for stock buybacks or fines. Money that goes to fines necessarily does not go to buybacks or dividends

Hmm, could we apply a fine to share. Either as fixed amount or percentage at time it is transacted on next time. Basically make them partially non-fungible...

So fine is applied at end of some day. Now all shares are marked. And when they are sold next time this fine is paid.

Shareholders of large public companies have limited ability to challenge the actions of directors, as proxy fights are in a majority of cases unsuccessful and shareholder lawsuits are also difficult as courts such as the Delaware Chancery are generally highly deferential applying the business judgement rule. For optimal effect, if non-corporate liability desired, suggest liability attach to directors and officers first instead.

It also serves as deterrent for smaller companies, and as regulatory capture occurs pulls the ladder up behind the big tech companies.

Oh I agree that if you're going to fee based on something, revenue is better than profit. My post wasn't trying to say otherwise. It's just that I don't believe it makes sense to gauge how fast companies pay off the fee in terms of revenue, such as was done in the article.

I didn't know companies can just ensure they have no profit on paper. Why don't they do that now and not pay corporate taxes? Why is it dependent on fines?

> Where they do or don't have an office isn't that important: it's about who they're doing business with.

It's important because it frames the lawsuit. If the company has a large presence in the country and is employing thousands of high-earning tax payers and leasing expensive offices, then the governments are not likely to bring frivolous fines against the company for no reason. On the other hand, if the company is making money and not paying anything back into their economy, the government has nothing to lose by attempting to extort them.

> And it's really very simple: "obey the law or sod off". If you think that's too much bother then that's completely fair – no hard feelings. Just don't do business then.

It's completely arbitrary in a lot of these cases. India fining Google $161m for smartphone market dominance and demanding specific remedies like not installing Google Chrome, YouTube, and Google Maps? How the hell was Google supposed to anticipate that?

Almost all of these in the table are like this. France fining Microsoft $64m (!) because their advertising cookie opt-out flow was not deemed clear enough? It's not that the flow didn't exist, mind you, it's that the button wasn't on the same page as the "accept cookies" button. Where in French or EU law does that exact requirement exist?

Profit margin for Big Tech is absurdly big compared to most other industries though, it makes much less of a difference than for grocers or other industries with razor-thin margins.

That's how the article above does it for some reason, so it is consistent but I agree it makes no sense.

It is though, instead of getting $100 they are now only getting 98% because they miss 7 days of revenue.

And actually it is going to be much worse because we haven’t deducted operating costs to find profit

> You can talk to a politician if you bother to call or email their office. Stop being obtuse.

Obviously you have more money than me. They don't answer my emails, ever. I tried.

> You want individuals to bid directly for government contracts?

There should be constructs to represent businesses which are not limited liability.

> The benefits of the current system are enormous, incomprehensibly enormous.

I completely disagree. You're conflating the benefits of technological innovation which are substantial with the benefits of socio-economic and legal 'innovation' which are non-existent and in fact negative.

It's like there is a really good horse but it's covered in parasites; e.g. ticks and you're praising the parasites for helping the horse win the race. It won in spite of the ticks, not because of them.

If you look at the west (e.g. US, Europe) in the 1800s and 1900s, most families could buy a nice house with land on just one income without even taking on debt. They could achieve this even while there were world wars going on and far less advanced technology than we have today.

The narrative about things improving for developing countries (or any other country) is nonsense. It's thinly veiled propaganda, just like ESG and Wokeism. If things were improving in developing countries, why would people from these countries be trying to immigrate to the west in unprecedented numbers today, even while the west itself is clearly declining? The GDP per capita of essentially all African countries is as low as ever. Only China has been doing well; but that's only because the west gave them a monopoly on manufacturing at its own expense due to short term thinking; which happens to be incentivized by corporate bonus structures in the west.

I don't even want to start talking about the media and how it interacts with big corporations and big government... But it would explain why you think everything is going great; all while an increasing number of people, highly skilled people are living in poverty. The level of deception in the media is unlike anything we've ever experienced before.

> The benefits of the current system are enormous, incomprehensibly enormous.

Sure. What are the drawbacks? Where are the opportunities for improvement?

Also, you provided a list of things we enjoy today that you're presumably attributing to capitalism. But clean water and roads are usually provided by governments, and electricity and garbage collection (in the US) are generally in a weird liminal space where it's usually corporations but they're heavily regulated (and there's usually some political corruption at the interface between the corporations and the regulators). Our modern food distribution system is a marvel, but it depends on the exploitation of a poorly paid underclass of often undocumented migrant workers to do much of the farm labor. And video games are nice, although some corporations are trying to turn video games into weird casinos (see: lootboxes).

Claiming that the status quo is great and critics are being merely self-interested is deliberately turning a blind eye to the many drawbacks, flaws, and areas that can be improved with the current system. "We have clean water now; DO YOU HATE CLEAN WATER?!" is a disingenuous, bad faith argument. It's the "We should improve society somewhat" comic.