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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

We need to climb two very difficult hills for there to be any change here: 1. We need our governments to actually start charging companies with crimes, when what they are doing would be illegal for an individual to do, and 2. We need the penalties to be something other than fines, which are ultimately treated by companies as routine costs of business.

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> We need the penalties to be something other than fines, which are ultimately treated by companies as routine costs of business.

It's true that fines are nothing more than predictable costs, so maybe an option would be fines in percentage of the incoming of the company: this way it could make a real impact. I know in some north Europe countries the speed limit fines are in percentage on the personal net worth.

> maybe an option would be fines in percentage of the incoming of the company

You are overengineering it. Just throw the CEOs in jail for a few months and observe how these practices disappear overnight.

> Just throw the CEOs in jail for a few months

It's not that easy: with bail and well payed lawyers they spend quite no day in jail and it is no more than a fine

Bail only works while waiting for the court date. I was talking about the actual sentence if found guilty.

Going after individuals instead of fining the company is still a better deterrent. Corporate fines are paid by shareholders and customers, not by the people who made the decision.

As a side note: If we believe that well paid lawyers can win all cases, there is nothing to discuss under this thread anyway. No fine or sentence can save us.

Income is too small, how about in terms of the highest market capitalization between deciding to do the bad thing and being convicted of the bad thing? Maybe some of these penalties should result in bankruptcies for the most egregious big players, and when I say bankruptcies I don't mean restructuring but actual corporate financial death: firesale auction the assets, debt holders lose much of their value, equity holders get squat, and all employees are out on their asses having been let go. Do it to a Microsoft or Google sized company, scare the piss out of the rest! Then implement protection policies to make it impossible to move headquarters out of the country without having product prices end up 2-4x higher, so domestic competition (which could be let to run tax free) can come up and fill the void. Also tax the hectomillionaires+ more heavily on assets, income, and capital gains!

I think that the fines should be the amount per crime that is being fined, plus the total amount of all revenue from whatever the fines are related to (including indirect, but only counted once).

So step one is a constitutional amendment to ban corporate money in politics, which is going to be suuuper hard to accomplish.

But yeah similar to how humans are put in jail and it can easily ruin their life, the punishment for a severe crime needs to ruin a company’s life. It’s an absurd double standard.

Simplest thing to say is: find all the people responsible for this, from the bottom to the top, and charge them with the same crime as an individual would be. I would include everyone in the chain from the programmers that implemented it, to the VP that authorised it, and finally to the CEO because all responsibility ends with them (that's why they get paid the big bucks right?).

I'd like to say look at Volkswagen for an example but I don't know if all the necessary people were charged.

I don't blame VW because EPA's requirements were killing diesel cars in the US. There haven't been any new model diesel passenger cars in about ten years now.

Similar policy is why American trucks and SUVs are ridiculusly massive transformer-looking behemoths and there're really no 'small' trucks anymore. The Ford Ranger of today is of similar size to the Ford F-150 of 25 years ago.

If the fine is higher than the revenue they get from it then that would presumably work.

Flogging or prison time for whoever has the highest salary.

Why not both?

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