[dathinab]

Google knowingly and _intentionally_ breached the law.

A fundamental rule for capitalism to work well long term is that oligopoly and similar should not exist and must be rained in or outright split up if they exist. If that rule isn't followed capitalism turns from a tool which can support democracy to one which will sooner or later tear it apart. It's basically the economic version of the number one rule of democracy: "never concentrate too much power into two few people".

This also isn't just some theoretical thing, if you look through history having too much money/power in to few entities(1) always sooner or later lead to suffering of people, injustice and collapse.

Lastly it's worth noting that historically companies often do challenge such fines and managed to cut them down by quite a bit, that is iff they actually started being compliant by then. Sadly the end result is often still that, the economically benefit of huge companies systematic breaking the law, outweighs their penalties. I mean they often do calculate the most likely level of penalties into their cost-benefit analysis.

(1): Through it should be noted that this is about effective power, not theoretic power. It isn't rare through history to have people which theoretically are autocrats with absolute power, but practically the power is spread quite widely and in turn them having a brain fart, mental decline, megalomaniac, irrational hate against some groups of people etc. didn't lead directly to atrocities being committed.

[inigyou]

You are describing free markets, I think, not capitalism. Capitalism is when rich people control everything, and we've achieved that.

[Muromec]

That usually corrects itself too, eventually.

[dathinab]

if we are nit picking definition then to quote wikipedia:

> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit

this neither implies free markets nor that "rich people control everything" but it more like a large category of economical systems we haven't always given distinct names

but common reasoning why capitalism and democracy work well together are based on a form of capitalism which fundamental requires fair and free markets.

This are the forms of capitalism the US had been fighting for in the past, the forms of capitalism most EU countries have committed to, but definitely not the form of capitalism we have in the US today.

The forms of capitalism which endanger instead of complement democracy have IMHO no place in democratic countries and IMHO we should give this harmful sub-category of capitalism it's own name to be able to better fight it.

Anyway just because there are bad forms of capitalism doesn't mean there aren't also good forms. And when pushing for "fixing" capitalism you at least have some chance to reach people. When you instead push to "replace" capitalism you are pretty fast hitting a wall where people aren't even willing to entertain reasoning with you (which is probably why the right wing tries to re-lable most things they don't like as anti-capitalist, communist or socialist even when the arguments have nothing to do with any of that (well the term socialism has been redefine and appropriated so often it has lost any meaning in taken out of context, but that is a different topic).

[inigyou]

That's the same system where rich people control everything. There's no system where people privately control the means of production and none of them ever use it to expand their control of the means of production.