Rules stopped mattering when tech companies have the government on speed dial.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Let's do some logic. You're an evil multitrillion dollar company that makes billions in profits by breaking the law. But, by doing so, you'll be fined 12 million dollars, of which you'll contest and get reduced to 7 million. Barely a blip on the monthly revenue stream.
I wonder why they keep ignoring (breaking) the laws.
It has always astounded me that penalties to companies are almost always either a tiny fraction or the ill-gotten gains, or at most the total amount of the ill-gotten gains.
I'm like NO! How about TEN TIMES the ill-gotten gains? Or literally some amount which is so much it's going to hurt the company. Like 25-50% of the value of the whole company?
And if that sounds like it's too much because the company would have trouble surviving, THAT'S THE POINT!
And then they get to KEEP the ill-gotten gains! What bank robber ever gets to keep the cash for when they get out?
Should get one warning fine and if they fail to abide by that the entire company gets parted out to a bunch of smaller entities and their software gets changed to FOSS.
This is a huge thing I am hoping Europe does. To vastly ramp up humungous fines
I'd vote for that 100%
Absolutely right. It's not a law for them, it's a fine.
Doesn't even amount to the taxes they paid the month the fine was issued. It's barely the cost of doing business.
Yeah, these ineffective fines need to stop. perhaps the following would work better:
1st offense: warning, public humiliation, reparations to the wronged. 2nd offense: meaningfully huge fine 3rd offense: even bigger fine and c-level prosecutions. 4th offense: stop work order and c-level prosecutions and personal liability. 5th offense: public tar and feathering.
Counter:
First intentional offense: permanent stop work order and c-level prosecutions and personal liability.
First unintentional offense: meaningfully huge fine, equal to no less than 25% of annual revenue.
Second intentional offense: won't happen, due to the first intentional offense permanent stop order.
Second unintentional offense: permanent stop work order and c-level prosecutions and personal liability.
The only way to fix this is to make it hurt from day one.
If laws are never enforced do they exist? Need to imprison people for white colar crimes or ban them from ever holding a position of power equivalent to their current.
How else do you expect them to monetize every aspect of your life, Peasant? More money means Better Than You.
Know your place and hand over your information. What are you, a communist?
fair enough. I hope all the Linux distros take note. you can easily not comply with the age verification laws by, not complying with them.
Rules stop mattering when companies have the wealth of multiple entire nations combined.
And any fines are essentially pennies that just get factored into the cost of doing business.
Yes fines should be a percentage for exp 5-20% of company valuation.
I say we start arresting board members until thing stop sucking. Death penalty on the table.
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They should be however much the company made by breaking the rules, with a hefty addition included, inversely multiplied by the chance that the company was going to get caught.
For a company, deciding whether or not to break the law is a purely mathematical equation. If you can make $1M a day by breaking the law, there’s only a 1% chance per day that you’ll get caught, and the fine is only $5M? That’s a no brainer. To the company, they see a project with $1M income per day, a 99% success rate, and a $5M failure cost. All you need to do is go undetected for five days, and you’ve already made your money on the “investment”. Everything after that is pure profit.
So the fines should be adjusted to fit that model. Using those same numbers, the fine would be the $1M per day that the scheme was going (meaning any profit made is now completely forfeit), plus the $5M, multiplied by 99 because they only had a 1% chance of getting caught.
For a scheme that ran for 100 days before getting caught, (meaning they made $100M in profit) that fine would be a grand total of $10.395B… Not million. Billion. Because in order to deter companies from breaking the law, the punishment needs to account for the fact that the company is going to do the math on whether or not they’ll get caught, and what the fine is going to be. And when the company runs the numbers and decides that they have a 1% chance of getting caught, that should be a fucking terrifying number instead of just a slap on the wrist.
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Which means the fines must equal the wealth of at least one nation to matter. I'm all for that.
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Of course they are, there aren't consequences.
Despite the general and indiscriminate scanning of people’s messages not being legal in the EU
Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap have already signaled in a joint statement to “continue to take voluntary action on our relevant Interpersonal Communication Services.” Whether this indicates continued scanning of our private communication is not entirely clear, but what is clear is that such activity would now risk breaching EU law. Then again, lack of compliance with EU data protection and privacy rules is nothing new for big tech in Europe.
It is utterly insane that any company thinks that they can ignore laws from at least two different continents and not only think they will get away with it, but are getting away with it, and doing it so blatantly, impetuously and with impunity.
They don't think. They know. They have carefully weighed the likeliness of repercussions vs to the profit to be made from doing it anyway. They have also weighed how likely it is they will face legal action and what the legal action will cost them. They have also also stacked the deck against the common user and any legislators that might want to hold them accountable through lobbying and other forms of coercion or bribery.
This is a well calculated "risk" vs reward for them.
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Wait, hasn’t the EU also been pushing for mandatory scanning of people’s messages FoR tHe cHiLdrEn?
Or were they just pushing for a backdoor in the encryption to enable selective scanning at a massive scale?
That's what the article linked is about. it was rejected, but Google, meta, snap etc.. said that they're going to scan anyway.
if (moneyMadeThroughCrime > (fine + bribeToOrangeMan))
doCrime()
else
doCrime(sneaky)
March into their campuses and start arresting executives and deleting servers at random until they comply.
This has the same energy as some medieval shit, a Protestant king ordering his army into a catholic monastery and burning all the books type shit. I’m here for it.
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The third largest economy in the world is uniquely positioned to end this, if they wanted to.
Exactly this, kick them out of California and don't allow them back as an example of what happens when you fuck around.
Fining them a double digit percentage of their **gross ** revenue also works.
I like that idea, but I really feel that corporations should face actual permanent consequences (just like a regular person) in order to begin balancing society. Until we put our foot down and bring mega corps to heel they will continue to lie, cheat, steal, and assist in things like genocide.
This isn't a new problem either. IBM provided the computing power and logistics that allowed Germany to carry out the Holocaust in the same way Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google have done so for Israel.
These companies are at war with humanity.
Absolutely. A corporate death penalty would be even better than existential fines.
"Corporations are people my friend", indeed.
We should be getting every Californian to work together to make that happen.
Also serious queation. What do you think they can do to make that happen?
Enforce existing laws to start with?
Legislate fines that are a percentage of the company's gross revenue if they don't act right.
These are things that have been tested in other countries & they work.
That's the real war right now. Corporations versus governments.
Friend, the governments are almost entirely on the side of the corporations. The only war is class war - the rich against the rest of us.
From a global perspective, lower class Americans fit the criteria for being rich. The true conflict is between 1st world countries and the global poor.
You're incorrect.
Wealth is not how much passes through your fingers.
It's how much you get to keep.
Slavery is not being denied the ability to earn. It is being denied the ability to save.
Lower-class people in the United States may in fact have quite a bit of money passing through their fingers at any given moment, but the way that financial systems are structured in the United States, those people are not beneficiaries of those funds, but merely vessels from which each and every cent must be extracted. No money is left at the end of the month, after rents, health insurance, transportation, the absurd costs of food, et cetera.
No, on the contrary, these people do NOT fit the criteria for being rich. They lack ownership of everything, and are paid a wage that is intentionally set lower than their actual living expenses. The fact that their wages may be deceptively high is LITERALLY a sign of deception and not in fact a sign that they get to keep any of that money.
The war is ABSOLUTELY between the wealthy and the poor within each country.
It is pretty freakin laughable to claim that the wealthy in the United States and the poor in the United States are on the same side of this conflict. The poor in the United States are the most direct victims of exploitation by the wealthy in the United States(and not to say that the poor in other countries are not also extremely exploited, but the poor in the United States are the ones the wealthy in the United States have direct knowledge of inflicting pain upon).
That’s for sure true, but even America’s middle class has more in common with the global poor than they do with the billionaires. Resistance must be carried out everywhere, even and maybe especially in America.
While you're correct, the cumulative effect of lower class and middle class Americans on 3rd world peoples dwarfs that of the upper class. It takes a lot of time and resources to maintain the lifestyle of a single person working 40 hours at McDonald's.
His consumer products were made in 3rd world factories polluting their local environments and the coffee he's drinking was bought for less than a dollar a kilogram from a farmer destroying a priceless rainforest. When this impact is multiplied by three-hundred million, the effects are as dramatic as they are unsustainable.
...I try not to think about it. It's a conflict between guilt and gratitude.
It's a shitty situation where we're both correct. The only thing to assuage that guilt is to try to use our privilege to bring down the system.
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Accepted financial risk
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