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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

"long history of prevailing in court" is another way of saying "Google isn't being punished as much as they deserve"

> Their job isn't to make people happy.

Sure, but I think we can all agree the US legal system very, very, very rarely issues any ruling that materially punishes a corporation. Even the worst of the worst typically get off very easy.

Do you disagree with that?

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> "long history of prevailing in court" is another way of saying "Google isn't being punished as much as they deserve"

Those two things are completely different and have very different meanings. For the most part, the courts aren't the ones that fine businesses.

> There have been more than 180,000 corporate fines issued in the US between 2020 and 2024, totaling more than $345 billion

> 3M Company has been issued with the costliest fines, adding up to $18.6 billion

$345 billion over 4 years seems like a lot to me. Maybe it should be higher? I don't know.

The system is not equipped to check and balance multi-trillion dollar corporations.

“The system” by which I assume you mean the Government of the United States or America doesn’t need to, because “the system” is sovereign. Corporations are not. They get checked when they get checked, and this ruling only avoided a worse-case scenario for Google. It wasn’t a win for them either.

Not GP, and I regularly lament as well the incredibly gentle treatment of certain companies that I'd argue should have been literally fined out of existence (e.g. Equifax, PG&E, etc.), but we should probably stop to reflect that if the US were a country which erred in the other direction, issuing crippling fines often, we would probably stop being the country where innovative companies choose to do business. I don't just mean that as a talking point, I actually think I probably would prefer to have the economy we have here today (with its injustice) compared to one where most innovative companies won't do business here because they can't afford the possible fines.

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