Rules stop mattering when companies have the wealth of multiple entire nations combined.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
555 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
84748 readers
4392 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
load more comments
(4 replies)
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.
I love the idea. The math works out a bit different though. After 100 days it's a 63% chance of getting caught so the fine would be 100/0.63= 159 million plus the additional fee. After 1 day the fine would be 1 million /0.01= 100 million plus the additional fee.
I love the actuarial precision of the fine so that all the probability of profit is priced in. Calculating that probability will be complex though because they could argue there is a 100% chance of getting caught after you caught them lol.
load more comments
(1 replies)
costs that just get passed onto the consumer anyway.
Which means the fines must equal the wealth of at least one nation to matter. I'm all for that.
How about we just don’t have private ownership of the means of production so we stop guaranteeing that only the most ruthless and greedy humans can rise to power? Democratic control over workplaces would largely prevent the monopolization on decision-making by the psychopath class.
At this point, there is no justification for privatized control of the means of production.
Especially for AI.
When the purpose of a technology is to remove the ability to work from as many people as possible, there is no valid reason for that technology to in any way benefit individuals without first benefitting those whose jobs it destroys.
The wealthy are literally job destroyers. That is what they actually are.
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
I think they will get their noses bloodied sooner or later, and well deserved too
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)
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.
I'd vote for that 100%
This is a huge thing I am hoping Europe does. To vastly ramp up humungous fines
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.
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie
Also, Vive la France
You don't need to go that far. Arrest and jail the CEO, and tell the execs you'll come back for them in 3 days.
I absolutely guarantee you the bad practice stops within 24 hours (or some smartass may try to hide it better, might warrant a few years in jail with the commoners, of course).
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.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Governments are complicit
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.
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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?
Accepted financial risk
view more: next ›