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Comment by null_investor | Hacker News Reader

What is hilarious to me is how the US government or courts doesn't seem to give a shit about this.

Corporativism in US is a thing. Companies can brick hospital systems killing patients, drive self-driving cars and run over people but don't get sued, and if they do, they settle for very little.

Just look at the recent Boeing incident where people were killed, the company clearly misled the US authorities and settled only a $0.5B fine.

Those companies in those scenarios should pay the fine that they should ($20B+), and if it means the company would go bankrupt, do it and form a new company diluting the previous shareholders.

Without doing this, shareholders and CEOs will have the incentive to carry on with their unfair practices that leads to dead people and deadlocked systems.

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> Just look at the recent Boeing incident where people were killed, the company clearly misled the US authorities and settled only a $0.5B fine.

The problem is when you fine a company, they will just turn around and offload that cost to their customers. Which in this case is the US government in a very large way. Boeing will make their part in the SLS a few billion more expensive again to offset it and even gain some profit. The US government are just fining themselves.

Fines just aren't an effective deterrent for companies. They should go back to imposing personal sentences on their leadership. But this is really unpopular because these guys are so well connected. So basically nothing is done and everyone goes free.

You could force the company to pay the fine in the form of a % ownership stake in the company. Then if the company raises prices to hose the government, the extra profit flows back to the government in dividends.

That actually sounds pretty compelling...

That only works when the company has full power to set prices unilaterally, i.e. when it has monopoly power. Which is a separate problem that should be prevented separately. If Cisco gets fined a billion dollars, it can't just hike up the price of a router, as it will lose plenty of business to Juniper/Arista/F5/etc.

They can in the short term because they have tons of companies way too invested in their ecosystem to change.

See what VMWare did after the broadcom takeover. They did exactly that.

Then what's stopping them from charging more today, in the absence of any fine?

Probably that they care about their customers, unlike Broadcom who just wants to milk the fat whales and isn't interested in the small fry. In other words: long-term vision over short-term gains.

The problem here is that "the company" is liable for the negligence of the person in charge. The person in charge is not liable for anything. And like you said, if the company has to pay, then the money obviously comes from its customers, not from the person in charge.

I think you meant US companies. The fine for Volkswagen was $20B+.

That's why the EU needs to kick out big tech and be much more unfriendly to US companies, have its own atomic bombs and security and not be dependant on a country that every election it's foreign policy completely changes (Democrats vs. republicans)

It feels like US can hit as much as they can EU companies, but EU needs to create a whole new regulation to slap a $1B fine in a 2 trillion company from the US.

what if the fine was giving up some shares to the government? With such a rule, after enough fines, the company would basically automatically become a public company.

Sounds too much like socialism to go anyhere.

It depends on who you want to punish, the shareholders, who have to give up their shares ... or the company, which doesn't really give a crap, as a whole.

> what if the fine was giving up some shares to the government?

What is the advantage over just fining? We keep trying to reïnvent the fine, which is great for those who would otherwise be fined.

If you want this to change, ban the CEO from holding a similar job or sitting on a board. If that doesn't work ban them from Aspen.

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