[thathndude]

This whole thing feels like Monopoly money. First, it’s $200m to a company valued at more than $800B.

Imagine you had 100k in the bank. That would be like a $25 late payment fee.

But on top of that, it’s $200m into the black hole that is our dysfunctional and bloated federal government. How do The Impacted children whose privacy was violated actually benefit.

It’s all ridiculous.

[vonmoltke]

> This whole thing feels like Monopoly money. First, it’s $200m to a company valued at more than $800B.

> Imagine you had 100k in the bank. That would be like a $25 late payment fee.

No, it isn't. A company's valuation is not money in the bank. The proper comparison is to profit.

[leetcrew]

some might argue the proper comparison is to the severity and scale of the offense itself.

[notyourday]

Proper comparison is the reaction of a CEO - if the CEO responds by firing the upper management->product management responsible for the part that caused the fine then the fine got a point across.

[true_religion]

It’s okay for a fine to be insignificant. Parking tickets are insignificant fines too, but in aggregate act to control parking behavior.

What’s needed is better enforcement, not more stringent fines.

[notyourday]

Not at all. Those who have cars and can afford the fine consider parking fines to be a cost of doing business. Get a ticket, pay it on the web.

Now if the car is towed that becomes a problem because just pulling out a credit card does not fix it.

[leetcrew]

> Those who have cars and can afford the fine consider parking fines to be a cost of doing business.

I don't. if the fine is $50 and it costs $5 to park, I will pay unless I suspect enforcement is so lax that I have a >90% chance of getting away with it.

[jlarocco]

> I don't. if the fine is $50 and it costs $5 to park, I will pay unless I suspect enforcement is so lax that I have a >90% chance of getting away with it.

That amounts to the same thing. You obey the regulations (pay for parking) except when you think it's cheaper not to. Companies do the same thing. Most of the time it works out, but sometimes there's a fine.

[zapzupnz]

I don't believe for a second that this represents the minority. One might be tempted to conjure reddit-like images of Chads and Karens who park their cars where ever, when ever, and for however long they like, but the majority of people aren't like this.

[notyourday]

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Parking-Violat...

That's 11.7M violations for fiscal 2018.

[zapzupnz]

Ahh, I meant to say "I don't believe for a second that this represents the majority"! Man, this comment makes no sense. Apologies.

[krj]

That doesn’t really work for a company like google with a largely blameless culture.

The only way of really judging is through repeat offences which is difficult in a case like this where the judgement was that Google didn’t do enough. That line of “enough” is going to be redefined a lot as the web develops (as it should be).

[notyourday]

> That doesn’t really work for a company like google with a largely blameless culture.

That's only the case because the cost of mistakes are insignificant. Should the mistakes start costing them 5% of revenue you can bet a farm that the person would be fired.

[Traster]

Alphabet has $125Bn cash on hand.

[root_axis]

FTA:

> The settlement would be the largest civil penalty ever obtained by the F.T.C. in a children’s privacy case. It dwarfs the previous record fine of $5.7 million for children’s privacy violations the agency levied this year against the owners of TikTok, a social video-sharing app.

This was a warning to YouTube, but from their perspective, there's clearly a subtext of "we're not afraid to raise the fines, next time could be a lot worse".

[HALtheWise]

I would normally say that the most reasonable comparison is to the profit obtained from related features or products. For example, the FTC should be able to fine Alphabet up to however much profit YouTube makes serving kids in the US. Unfortunately, it is widely rumored that YouTube makes no profit, and that means they almost certainly don't make much money off of kids. Still, at some point, you have to watch out that the fines don't get so big that it just makes sense for YouTube to ban all content targeting kids, at least in the US, because that would be a disaster for everyone given the amount of educational content there. Google pulled out of the China market because the moral and economic costs of complying with government regulations wasn't worth the value of the market, we don't want them doing the same thing here for specific products.

[utopian3]

> Google pulled out of the China market because the moral and economic costs of complying with government regulations wasn't worth the value of the market..

That’s not why they left

[belltaco]

>Imagine you had 100k in the bank. That would be like a $25 late payment fee.

If you had 100k in the bank, you could write a check to someone for 100k.

Can Google write a check to someone for $800B ?

[benologist]

They have over $100 billion in cash so they're not there yet, but they're not suffering either.

[b_tterc_p]

Compared to just YouTube’s annual income it’s not trivial