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Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying that bankrupting businesses is the best strategy, but it can be helpful. If you put fear into these companies that they can get wiped out at a moments notice they will smarten up really quick. If you show them that they will get a fairly cheap slap-on-the-wrist warning first they will ignore the rules until they get the first warning, then toe the line.

So if you want the whole industry to follow the rules without investigating and fining each one-by-one you better make sure that your first action against them makes them regret their choices.

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HelloFresh made an honest mistake. It's the sort of mistake that anyone could have made. They had poor understanding of some fairly complex legislation and wrote an insufficiently clear opt-in statement. This led to some people who had consented to receive promotional e-mails instead receiving text messages, or emails of a type that they didn't expect based on the opt-in.

The regulator is fully satisfied that HelloFresh made an honest mistake, they're satisfied that they've taken adequate steps to fix the underlying problem, but the fine essentially says "you made a fairly minor mistake, but you're a big company and we expect better".

What you're proposing is an arbitrary and disproportionate punishment pour encourager les autres. It's the corporate equivalent of sending people to the gulags for littering. It doesn't work, it's hugely costly and it is (rightly) illegal in any country governed by the rule of law. You can't make people infallible through fear.

> HelloFresh made an honest mistake. It's the sort of mistake that anyone could have made.

They did not, as explained by countless posters below you. What they did was skimped regulation.

> You can't make people infallible through fear.

Corporations are not people. Their only incentive mechanism is that of profit extraction. If you make the cost of noncompliance infinitely high, there's infintely high incentive not to be incompliant. Humanizing a form of establishing an economic enterprise with littering examples as if that's valid is one funny joke you did there.

They made no honest mistake at all. I used them two years ago, did the unsubscribe thing three times since and still get spam from them. They know exactly what they are doing, same as beer53.

There are far worse entities than HelloFresh that are still alive as of today and given that the ICO is trying hard to get parties to comply it is kind of logical that they take an individual approach to each case. That said I think 140K is too low.

You are kind of stating the problem with individual approaches.

> There are far worse entities than HelloFresh that are still alive as of today

If these entities saw HelloFresh bankrupted with no prior warning and no option for recourse some number of them will clean up their act. When they see the first fine being tiny they will just double down because they know that they will get a warning before any serious action. And other entities that were following the rules will reconsider and start breaking them because they realize that the cost is tiny so they may as well get the benefit.

Basically there is some value to making an example of HelloFresh and showing that you will not get a warning, breaking the rules will not be tolerated. The first offense will be punished more than they have profited off of the crime.

I am playing a bit of a devil's advocate here. I think the correct position is likely somewhere in the middle. But it is clearly flawed if for each individual business their first fine is less than than their profits for doing the crime. Because that incentivizes every business to break the rules until they get their first "warning".

I'm all for exponentially increasing fines with the first one a base 10% of turnover wiping out roughly half of last years profits for most entities. The second violation would wipe out all of their profits for a year, the third would undo two years of life and so on. Before you get to 5 you either get the message or you're done.

If regulators followed your advice and started putting companies out of business with that sledgehammer/nut approach to enforcement then the UK economy would crash faster than you can watch a lettuce go bad. (Again.)

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