[crazygringo]

Just a nitpick -- a fraction of their profit (net income), not revenue. Most of revenue already goes out the door as expenses. If you fined as a reasonable fraction of revenue, you'd simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.

If global revenue is $20B and we assume 20% profitability, that's $4B, and so this fine is 15% of global profit.

That's a gigantic fine.

You also have to remember that tons of these regulations are vague and unclear and massively open to interpretation, and that companies can genuinely believe they are complying, and their lawyers agree, but then judges still rule otherwise, because it's ultimately just a matter of opinion because of the vagueness.

You also have to remember that individual countries fining on global revenue runs the risk of fines "duplicating" each other for the same or similar behavior, again bankrupting a corporation when the goal should be to change behavior.

[Macha]

> Just a nitpick -- a fraction of their profit (net income), not revenue. Most of revenue already goes out the door as expenses. If you fined as a reasonable fraction of revenue, you'd simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.

Nah, hollywood accounting is alive and well in tech. Especially in Ireland, where plenty of tech companies are being "charged" slightly absurd fees for services or trademark licenses by subsidiaries or parents in other countries to avoid making a profit on their tax filings.

[crazygringo]

No -- there's no such thing as Hollywood accounting in tech at the global level.

Yes you can certainly shift things around at the country level. But when you add up all the subsidiaries together in the single global corporation (the publicly traded one when it exists), the numbers are the numbers. Income minus expenses is a single, stable number that you can't fudge.

[gaiagraphia]

The internal operations of a company shoud be irrelevant to nations.

If a company is taking £billion out of a nation's spending power, and doing so with nefarious practices, that's what should be fined.

If bankruptcy is a worry, then comapnies shouldn't fly so close to the sun when adopting immoral practices.

Income is the only reliable thing you can tax. Trying to calculate profit for international companies is an absolute joke which is massively inefficient. Why an Earth should governments employ entire teams to second guess internal bookkeeping?

If you want to take a billion from a nation's citizens, better be sure you're providing a legal service. I mean, are drug dealers punished on profit?

[crazygringo]

Nothing of what you're saying makes any sense.

> Income is the only reliable thing you can tax.

Then why does every country on earth tax corporate profit, not income?

> Why an Earth should governments employ entire teams to second guess internal bookkeeping?

Because that's how you make sure companies pay their taxes? Because it's a net gain to employ those teams because they find much more tax cheating than it costs to employ them?

> If a company is taking £billion out of a nation's spending power

Companies don't. They take cash and in return provide services that are even more valuable. The entire idea of free trade is that it's positive-sum for all.

[GeoAtreides]

>You also have to remember that tons of these regulations are vague and unclear and massively open to interpretation, and that companies can genuinely believe they are complying, and their lawyers agree, but then judges still rule otherwise, because it's ultimately just a matter of opinion because of the vagueness.

This is the equivalent of the famous Babbage anecdote, but for the law. That's absolutely not how the law or regulatory compliance works, not in Europe at least.

[crazygringo]

...but it absolutely is? Why do you think fines get appealed, and companies often win on appeal?

If there weren't vagueness and shades of gray, then appeals courts would barely need to exist.

[ta1243]

When you get a fine in Europe it tends to be related to your income. Not your income after your expenses, your actual income.

Finland for example will fine you 100k for speeding if your income is high enough. In the UK fines range from 50% of your weekly income (band A) to 600% of your weekly income. Someone on £500 a week income and spending that on housing, food etc, could pay £3k. Someone with the same offence on £50k a week would be fined £300k.

[crazygringo]

Well, individuals and corporations are different.

Individuals are also taxed on all their income, whereas corporations are taxed only on their profit.

Corporations are effectively intermediaries in production chains. Profit is the only meaningful metric, how much value do they add. Individuals are at the "end" of the chain, how much value do they consume.

The proper analogy of a fine being based on income for an individual, is for a fine being based on profit for a corporation.

[ipaddr]

Someone unemployed speeding to a job interview gets a pass? That seems like a big loop hole.

[lupusreal]

Doing anything by fractions of profit is an invitation for Hollywood accounting. "Oops we have no profit because we have accountants who's job it is to shuffle money around in circles until everybody gets confused and gives up."

> simply bankrupt a corporation, which is not what you want if your goal is to change behavior.

Yes it is. Nuke the corporation and burn all the investors. This will teach a lesson.

[crazygringo]

No it's not.

The goal of punishment is correction of behavior, not destruction.

By your logic, we ought to apply the death penalty for stealing a candy bar. Because that will teach a lesson too, no?

[lupusreal]

The purposes of punishment include rehabilitation, as you mention, but also deterrence, incapacitation, retribution, denunciation, and restoration:

Deterrence: Destruction of the corporation serves as a lesson to the rest of society, to scare them away from doing the same.

Incapacitation: A corporation which no longer exists cannot reoffend.

Retribution: The deserve nothing less.

Denunciation: Overlaps with deterrence; gives people the benifit of knowing they live in a society where wrongdoing is punished. Suppresses vigilantism.

Restoration: The funds retrieved by bankrupting and liquidating the corporation can, at least in principle, go towards undoing the harm the corporation caused.

As for stealing candy bars, I think there is merit to going light on children. But corporations? Corporations are not children. They aren't even people. They deserve no mercy.

[crazygringo]

> Corporations are not children. They aren't even people. They deserve no mercy.

What?

Corporations provide us with valuable products and services we rely on. They employ people.

Corporations aren't evil, as you seem to think. Like people, they make mistakes, because they're made of people.

Your attitude is sociopathic, quite honestly. It scares me.

[lmkg]

> You also have to remember that individual countries fining on global revenue runs the risk of fines "duplicating" each other for the same or similar behavior, again bankrupting a corporation when the goal should be to change behavior.

This is explicitly not a concern under GDPR. The "one-stop shop" mechanism means that all issues across the EU get funneled to the lead supervisory authority, which is always Ireland because that's where EU subsidiaries are headquarters for tax purposes.

[gundmc]

Yes, but there are countries outside of the EU who may also decide to fine based on global revenue.

[ta1243]

Either obey the law in those countries, or don't do business there.

[observationist]

This is wrong, and even revenue isn't sufficient - you want to fine a sizeable fraction of the total value of all assets of the company based on the scope, duration, and severity of the violation.

Companies don't protect user data. They store, silo, and secure user data for as little cost as possible. No meaningful consequences means they will continue to harvest and disperse user data at an increasing rate until we get serious about requiring responsible practices and accountability.

The risk of being bankrupted is what will keep a corporation behaving well.

Penalties should be fatal to a corporation. If Microsoft or some random new startup had to follow the same regulations and protect user data to some bare minimum standard, and we apply the same degree of penalty, rather than some arbitrarily large fine which the mega corps are happy to pay, we can affect behavior.

The big companies have teams of lawyers who effectively (and sometimes explicitly) collude with the beancounters and MBAs to enshittify their products and services and milk every last drop of revenue, even exploiting the data of non-customers who just happened to encounter some peripheral surveillance apparatus.

We need to protect individual data privacy and restrict anything except informed consensual tracking. We need to mandate ephemerality and basic security standards. We need to make violations of these regulations lethal to a company, and impose mandatory minimum jail time for c-suite offenders.

Anything short of this results in overt, blatant, repeated violations of the laws by the big companies because they're happy to pay $5m or even $50m if it means they extract $500m more revenue and lock out any potential disruptive competition.

This would effectively mean that giant platforms which cannot responsibly store and manage user data would not be able to continue operation at the scale they're at. It would mean fragmentation and decentralization of various services, disincentivizing monopoly, improving market health, driving product and service progress.

Without harsh and extreme consequences that are as meaningfully painful to FAANG sized megacorps as they are to a one man startup, the problems won't ever be resolved. FAANG and tech outpaced regulation, resulting in effectively the total pwnage of data for more or less every living human on the planet. This is unacceptable, and the only way it changes is for the US to drop the hammer on the exploitive and irresponsible practices that led us here.

Let these asshats go bankrupt. We don't need Meta or Alphabet or Amazon. They're not entitled to screw the world for profit. If they can't operate ethically and responsibly, then they shouldn't be allowed to operate at all.

[linkregister]

This is an incomplete understanding of the stakeholders in these rulings.

1. The goal of the fines is to act as a deterrent and to encourage companies to get back into compliance.

2. The arbiters aren't operating in a vacuum. Bankrupting services that the citizens of a country rely on is unpopular and not in service of goal #1.

3. We know that this is the case because Uber and other ride sharing services were able to violate the law and convince voters to have the law changed to permit these services.

4. Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue. Compliance departments are not funded as a job creation or charity exercise. When companies report earnings, these fines frequently determine whether earnings guidance is achieved. This impacts company officers' compensation.

tl;dr, you passionately believe in these views, but it is not one held by the majority. Your minority view should not be the basis of public policy.

[ta1243]

So a company should be free to break as many laws as it wants and never have any risk to its owners?

[linkregister]

> Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue.

That's financial risk.

For criminal risk, a change to existing laws would have to be made; they currently carry only civil penalties to the organizations involved. I think that those laws would be popular. They would have to be carefully crafted to narrowly target behavior without unacceptably impairing capital investment and business formation. That would negatively impact the quality of life of the countries' residents.

[hulitu]

cough Airbnb, Uber cough. /s

[ta1243]

> Let these asshats go bankrupt.

No need to go bankrupt, just force-issue more shares, diluting the existing shareholders. These are then sold on the open market and the revenue goes to paying the fine.

Only if the share price drops to zero does the company then go bankrupt.