this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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Yeah, that's how it should work. We have personal experience of a bogus complaint being filed by a big player with a regulatory agency, the agency coming around and interviewing / intimidating us, and subsequently sending us paperwork finding that the complaint was "substantiated" - something we consulted with a couple of lawyers about and they said "this would never, ever stand up in any kind of hearing or trial or other official process, but... to get it reversed will effectively cost you a couple of thousand dollars out of pocket and a lot of time and hassle - better to ignore it." Of course the real issue is that the big player was guilty of everything in the complaint and more, this is just them "getting in front of the problem" before we complained about them - which we actually had no intention of doing...
The restaurant example comes from a friend who was running a restaurant when he decided to run for political office. His incumbent opponent was directing health inspections of his restaurant at about 10x the normal frequency of inspections... Again, you can fight it, but even if you have the resources to win, what do you get for your troubles?
Meanwhile, the bad actors in the above scenarios repeat their bad actions over and over for marginal advantages. Maybe someday they'll be taken down for it, but usually not.
It sounds like you are talking about a lawsuit instead of a complaint, or at least I see the two different. Complaints don´t have anything to do with the actual court and lawsuits do.
That is just corruption shining through, something like that (samples) should only be done in set intervals f.e. Man, the US really sucks. And people keep going to massive companies and especially in the US that is destroying jobs and possible the entire country. A lot of the money from massive companies doesn't end up inside the US government's treasury.
What I'm talking about is abuse of those complaint systems which is only rectifiable via lawsuit. The abuse lies in the low cost (50€?) of filing a complaint, the corruptability / apathy-indifference of the complaint handling agency, and the relatively high cost of seeking justice vs un-just complaints. In theory, complaint processing at the agencies should filter out frivolous, harassing and otherwise improper complaints - but that's very frequently not how things run, not all the time.
Yep. I'm thinking more and more what "made us great" in the past was the relative youth of our institutions. The longer these things run the further from ideal they tend to become. I would be very much in favor of institutional reform to attempt to continually improve these situations, but of course "institutional reform" is often a cover for fast-track corruption enabling.
Dystopian future stories about global corporate rule making governments irrelevant have been around for a long long time - the US is continuing to develop in that direction, but we do have at least a little further to go before we completely get there (even with recent accelerations in some areas.)
I am not sure if this is even correct, The Netherlands as it currently is, is pretty young, but people have been living in Europe for ages. We are one of the countries with the lowest corrupt, we do pay a lot of corrupt nations/people though, but that is a different story.