It makes no sense that breaking the law gives milder consequences just as long as your crime is transnational and very extensive in scope.
Instead there are options:
1. Govt walks in and just nationalizes them ala Japan post world war 2 where Mitsubishi, Sumimoto etc where just turned into puppets over night As in hostile takeover to influence how they use their loot.
2. Govt can then use the SpaceX model to disrupt brick and mortar sectors world wide (cement, steel, ships, planes, energy, fertilizer etc etc). The test will be bringing prices down of everything not just for Americans or the west but for everyone. other wise immigration waves just like the drugs flowing into the west will never stop.
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.
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.
There's at least a theoretical chance of voting the government out in favour of someone marginally better. I don't know what are the odds of that happening, but it's definitely bigger than 0%. And if we're not in the board of directors of a company, our odds of making them less corrupt is precisely 0%.
Corporate combinations are profit machines.
Governments are bureaucracy and vote-getting machines.
Pick your monomaniacalism.
But! Bureaucracy does have the benefit of being defined by law. Which... big tech really doesn't.
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).
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.
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.
This is not the kind of democracy I want to live in.
I'd much, much 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.
As a society, we should learn to hone the oscillatory nature of the complex system that is a tech niche: a niche forms => many apps populate the space => one app begins dominating => it consumes the rest (e.g: buy outs) => eventually the "one" app is replaced by a new market of apps.
We're failing on the last step and I'd like to get there without using the government's monopoly on violence.
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.
Fines are the cost of doing business. They are nothing more than an expense item. People who knowingly cause people to die or otherwise cause great harm as leaders of a compnany should go to prison way more often. Every penny the Sacklers made should be seized by the government.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-opioid-crisis-purdu...
So the real goal is to have Congress create a law that states that if a CEO is not a fiduciary of the employees (in contrast to an fiduciary of investors) they should be jailed
Seems like that would be a good law
Investors - despite the claims from fund managers - aren’t moving countries to avoid this stuff because the actual LPs are American institutional 401k and Funds which theoretically are employees.
So a law requiring corporate management to prioritize labor over capital would I think actually make a good impact.
I don't see how this can possibly be true. Any corp has finite money, and operating costs; If the fines are high enough, they will be consequential.
> to span multiple countries
you can't really evade US fines/sanction and continue to operate in the west.
At the end of the day, the C-suite either know that the law is being broken, or they don't. One makes them responsible, and the other makes them criminally negligent. I absolutely believe that C-suite executives of VW, for example, should have been thrown in jail for diesel-gate. Not knowing the law is not an excuse for breaking it. Similarly, if you're presiding over a company, and your company is breaking the law, plausible deniability shouldn't be a defense. If you're getting paid to run the company, you are responsible.
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."
Plus what's the logic behind the most draconian of implementations? - If we can hold Bezos to account, why not every AMAZON shareholder?
Shareholders aren't making these decisions. But if shareholders voted for something they knew was illegal or could have known was illegal, then yes, maybe they should be held to account too.
What are "these decisions"? I assumed you are talking about punishing people like Bezos for the activities of Amazon, even without proof he had direct knowledge/involvement of them, purely based on his position as a c-suite figurehead?
They're operating a platform that enables criminal activity and they benefit from it. They've been told this (and even without it, they can and should have known). And then they elected to not do all that much about it. "Don't do anything" is just as much of a decision as "do something" is.
Last time I looked at this they were literally recommending scams with "Amazon's Choice"[1]. That one is now gone, but you just need to "sort by price" (a reasonable thing to do) to find tons of scams.[2] None of this is new information. This has been going on >10 years. There's tons of stories about this sort of thing.
"Yeah, there's tons of scams on our site, and yeah, we're making a profit off those scams, but what can we do?" just doesn't fly. Rampant illegal activity you're making a profit on but somehow no one is accountable? Screw that.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34588734
[2]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=2tb+usb+ssd&i=computers&s=price...
Agreed. But law-makers and politicians in charge of the judiciary have been bought. Laws and the enforcement of them won't change any time soon