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Comment by dale386 | Hacker News Reader

Marriot made $11.8 billion in 2012. $600,000 is not an actual punishment.

$600,000 is enough to make the entire venture very much unprofitable. Whoever in the management chain was responsible for this will have trouble meeting their targets, not to mention keeping their job. The PR damage is massive.

The FCC has no place setting fines based on the total size of a corporation. It seems rather proportionate to me, given that they were attempting to profit from willful interference, and that's in the ballpark of how much they probably made. I doubt Marriott, or any other major US hotel chain, will ever attempt this again. Seems to me the punishment worked, without having to get dragged into courts, appeals, and legislation if they had, for example, fined them $1 billion.

The document in question mentions them having over 4,000 managed properties, assuming an average of $1,000/month for each one of those, across the 2 years between October 2012 and now, that's $96,000,000. I seriously doubt $600,000 is enough to make the venture unprofitable.

Even if I'm off by two full orders of magnitude it'd still be $960,000, and it's possible I'm undercutting the truth.

I think $600,000 for this incident makes the net venture still profitable. I'd bet that $1,800,000 for each future incident (assuming treble damages because they'd already been penalized for this once) would make it very unprofitable very quickly.

It sounds like they were only blocking connections at one specific property (Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee), which changes the math a bit.

Also, don't forget the cost of doing compliance audits across all of their properties for the next three years, which is not going to be cheap either.

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