Like some European country(s) do with personal fines, afaik.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
If we want to stop bad behaviour, there can be NO PROFIT from illegal actions.
So if a company makes billions of dollars, through illegal actions, all of those billions of dollars need to be the fine, and the board and senior executives should also face personal fines, so they aren't also profiting.
Making the fine cover all revenue from the crime makes more sense. A bank robber doesn't get to claim that some of what they took should go to pay for their getaway car.
I had trainings upon trainings about this, particularly because in my line of work I deal with medical data, which is categorised as sensitive.
Not enough not, you still get almost all market participants trying to skirt the law instead of actually respecting it.
Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness.
IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side
The purpose of a fine is not supposed to be a fee for a crime but a penalty that has deterrent effects. A flat fine is not an equal deterrent for people of different financial means.
In Finland the system is called "day fine", meaning it should match approximately a day of labor/income. In some situations you can even go to sit in prison for time proportional to the day fines, although this is nowadays rare.
Otherwise it isn't a penalty and is just the price of being permitted to do a thing which might be out of reach for the poor. That's just fundamentally unfair to permit the rich to do things we consider immoral if they are just able to afford it.
Fairness in this case would mean giving equal fines for equal crimes.
But equality in which units? There's a case to be made that dollars are an implementation detail and that the political system cares about utility units.
If you want the fine to equally disadvantage all parties in utility units then the dollar values are going to be different. Because the idea is that each criminal should be equally unhappy with receiving the fine.
You can say it's the same percentage so it's the same punishment, but you can't pretend this isn't a recent change in jurisprudence.
If you jail different people, they lose out on different amounts of income. Is that unfair?
Now remove the physical jail component and keep the rest of the punishment. Is that unfair?
Similar, even fines proportional to income are still unfair because to determine how much a fine hurts you need to compare it to whats left of the income after basic needs have been paid for. For someone that has much more than they need, getting fined 50% of their income will suck but not immediately change their lifestyle while someone who is living paycheck to paycheck is going to be ruined by the same percentage fine.
There is another side that feels the penalty should "hurt" the same amount because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction feel the same amount of pain (theoretically), roughly corresponding to paying the same relative amount.
IMO this falls apart when you accept the almost tautological fact that these laws are enforced selectively, so "fairness" goes out the window almost immediately. Enforcement is used as political pressure and as punishment. Under that view, the second option above feels much worse than the first.
Proportional fees "hurt" everyone the same and give the government the discretion to "hurt" whomever they choose via malicious prosecution and selective enforcement. Flat-rate fees at minimal amounts save most people from this corruption. If the difference is between a flat rate penalty that hurts 5% of society if imposed, and a proportional penalty that hurts 100% of society if imposed, how is the first one not objectively better in the nearly certain scenario of a bad actor being in charge at some point in the future?
I think the reasoning as that when Google does it, it affects far more people than if (say) I sold a single phone with only my own apps pre-installed. Should I be fined $55 million?
10% hurts the same no matter your income.
Fines are about punishment and deterrence. You cant deter a millionaire with a 100$ fine like you can a pensioner on a fixed 1000$ income.
No, 10% of income doesn't hurt the same no matter your income. (Even if you ignore the relationship loose correlations between income and savings that can be used to cushion the effects of unexpected expenses, and assume neither party has any such resources.)
While fungibility pushes slows the decline compared to less-fungible goods, declining marginal utility applies to income, too, which means not only does a flat fine have less impact on the rich, so does a flat percentage.
(This gets even more true when you do consider savings, etc.)
Even better might be a percentage of disposable income but even that is not going to be enough and with more complexity in the rules comes more opportunity for creative accounting which again benefits those more well off.
Id rather have it scale badly than not at all though.
10% is more just. Than a flat fine.
But 10% hurts more when you are poor and have no savings and you need that money to pay rent. For small companies is the same. Bigger corporations have more resources available to minimize that 10% impact. Power does not scale linearly with money.
But to take a percentage is a much better way than a flat fine. Flat fines are totally ineffective when applied to big corporations.
The more your wealth (and note that income is a crude approximation here), the easier your ability to pay. Hopefully you agree that a $50 parking fine means virtually nothing to a billionaire; it may as well not exist. Whereas to someone living at the poverty line, it is incredibly significant.
If you feel it's fair to penalize everyone the same absolute amount of money, that means you believe that rich people have effectively earned themselves a right(!) to violate laws that poor people can't afford to.
Or, putting it more bluntly, it means you think rich people are superior to poor people.
Is that fair?
Just look at 2008. I'm convinced many things started to go downhill hard when the worst global financial meltdown since the 1930s went down with not one single person going to jail.
> The less severe infringements could result in a fine of up to €10 million, or 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
> These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".
It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.
This works for Chinese businesses pretty well.
The problem for Western businesses is that "Creating domestic competition to any Western business with a comparative advantage which becomes too important to China" is always, on some level, a national priority.
My favorite Party explainer - https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-l...
The incoherent views of the hn user: "We need to do something about the corporations" but also "China is evil for doing something about the corporations"
[0] https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/AAPL/financials/
The 500 million one is also for anti-trust rather than GDPR, which is the one that includes % global revenue fines.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Because the politicians and "regulators" rotate back into the private sector and earn generational wealth for playing ball.
So what happens is that they wind up going with non-massive fines to enforce compliance as a trade off (like you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing).
And this has been known for 150+ years and it has been written about extensively, its just not considered acceptable/appropriate knowledge. Marxists study this.
Capitalism as we have it today is (roughly speaking) to laissez faire capitalism as modern China is to Maoism.
Marxism isn't as wildly flawed as some want it to be — but it is very, very out of date, a response to a world which we no longer live in.
Turned out there were a lot of ways to regulate capitalism besides all-in on Marxism.
The type of capitalism Marx described is alive and well.
It exists in the undeveloped parts of the world, and it is maintained through force by many capitalist blocks and their allies. People around the world are kept exploited because their economies eventually tie into ours, and their exploitation makes us "competitive". Just because its not you and your kids toiling all day doesn't mean there aren't any.
And it was like that here too, it was only undone through force by socialists, that's why you're allowed to work 8 hours a day only, we have a minimum wage, and children aren't working in factories.
This didn't happen by the graciousness of profiteers, it happened through the threat posed by the masses, people were killed on American streets for this. Don't ever forget that. That's how they rewrite history.
Don't think it can't arise again, it evidently is... slowly.
Obviously they did not get everything right (far from it), as their most fervent acolytes believed. But then again, in economics, who does?
Sort of? Marxism is like economic phlogeston. It’s experimentally predictive to many extents. But it gets some basics wrong and is superseded in its entirety by better models, particularly for information-age and increasingly-automated economies.
More murder and war has been perpetrated as part of anti-Marxism than any other cause in history.
- The Vietnam "War" (Genocide) - The Korean "War" (Genocide too) - The whole Afghanistan affair that still resonates on today - Balkanization (induced by NATO) - Indonesian govt killing 1.5 million in a single year (CIA) - US trained South American Death Squads - Invasion of Barbados by the US - the overthrow of Burkina Faso - the overthrow of Allende - the School of the Americas - Nazis killed more non-semitic East Europeans than jews in the name of anti-marxism
You could, in a very real sense, draw a line through the history of modern warfare and the history of anti-Marxism.
Only for Americans is it a myth because they are primed by their billionaire controlled media and educational system to avoid it.
All in all, its a theory of socio-economic development that implies the democratization of production. That's literally whats so bad about it.
Just look up all the ecological and environmental disasters in Eastern Europe and Russia, or the insane economic fuckups from the ‘great leap forward’ (or even going on right now!) in China for a breath of fresh air, amiright?
People be people. No system is going to magically solve these problems, but some (anything authoritarian, usually!) can certainly make them worse.
Most industries require regulations, to maintain competition, to avoid market manipulation, to maintain public health and safety, and to stop crime.
Some industries require government intervention or even participation, to ensure the existence of nationally critical infrastructure and to protect national resilience and safety.
"Pure" capitalism is just as much a nonsense as "pure" communism.
I'm a socialist because I know you can't stop it that way. It's simply impossible. They will corrupt/lobby/influence their way around it. They currently do.
What is your plan? To REALLY SUPER DUPER trust the next candidate you have zero control over?
"Democratic socialism" is not democratic or socialism. Socialism is actually democratic and prevents exploitation.
The only way to actually stop it is to not allow individuals to profit off of others. Individuals shall make their OWN assets through their own muscles. No ownership of property that allows you to reap what others sow. It's logically the only way to avoid power imbalances. And it's something that we all enforce and control through local councils.
Remember, democracy is not trust, its control.
Any group larger than a dozen is fundamentally going to have someone else controlling other peoples stuff - de facto or de jure. It’s how things scale.
Regulations enforced by courts are the only tool functioning societies are willing to use to limit corruption, including under communism. Some forms of communism are anarchic and just assume it will work without it, but then I can say this about anarch-capitalism too, and it's just as wrong there.
> The only way to actually stop it is to not allow individuals to profit off of others.
There are many kinds of profit besides the currencies broadly recognised today. Money itself is a fungible token of power, and the very same corruption works just as effectively when it's any other form of power. It's even possible just by barter, as demonstrated by that guy who swapped his way from a paperclip to a house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip
To actually stop corruption would require an incorruptible omniscient surveillance system, and I know of nobody who wants one of those even in principle due to the downside of what "omniscient" means, and in practice it doesn't matter anyway due to the lack of incorruptible people to act in this role.
> And it's something that we all enforce and control through local councils.
Ah, the small-commune model of communism. For reasons too long to go into, this limits you to roughly the tech level of the Late Bronze Age collapse. Even then, this is only even stable until someone outside your council comes along with an army, and at best they insist you use modern tech you previously couldn't import because you abolished money, at worst you're working for a 1700 AD equivalent to the Spartans.
We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR. This has lessened somewhat as it has become more clear that those massive fines aren’t being handed out and the language has been clarified, but I sat through multiple meetings where companies were debating if they should block GDPR countries until the dust settled even though they believed themselves to be compliant. They didn’t want to risk someone making a mistake somewhere and costing the company a percentage of global revenues.
Talking about massive fines that destroy big companies and crush their executives is really popular in internet comment sections but it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages.
Where do I sign up to be too big to punish?
This may be true, but arresting drug dealers would also be unpopular with a lot of junkies. :-)
The problem is that these kinds of harmful practices (by companies) are like a slow frog-boil. The companies foreground the benefits and hide the costs until people are lulled into dependence and are unwilling to roll it back. But that doesn't mean we don't need to roll it back. It might hurt, but we still need to do it.
Unless junkies have started a new service to help me find the nearest hospital that I'm not familiar with. Otherwise, spontaneously blocking Google could cause material harm to people reliant upon it. You'd be surprised how many users are so net-ignorant that they wouldn't even know how to get to Bing if their default page stopped resolving.
Certainly I acknowledge that Google provides useful and maybe even essential services to people. But just because we want those services doesn't mean we necessarily need to allow Google to continue providing them. A parallel in the drug world might be shady pharmacists who get people hooked on painkillers. Yes, maybe it's good to have Vicodin, but that doesn't mean we need to let this particular person control it. Similarly it might be good to have maps, but that doesn't mean it's good to have some megacorp controlling them --- even less so if they try to use that as leverage to prevent regulation of other harmful aspects of their business.
Regarding loci of control: I've been using mapping tools built on OpenStreetMap as of late, and they're good, but they're no replacement for Google Maps. Things Google makes simple like "restaurants near me" are just fall-flat-on-your-face bad in most of the OSM clients I've seen. So I'm loathe to declare we need to kill the working thing when the alternative is worse. My preferred approach to ending a Google map monopoly would be to invest in making the alternatives better (particularly the open alternatives). Give people a better option, and we won't have to "kill" Google; the market will do it for us.
You have no idea just how much revenue Google et. al make from e.g. the EU. The shareholders would absolutely eat Google alive for just walking away from many billions of dollars rather than just complying. I've said this here before:
> A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.
> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
> Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP.
You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech.
>We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR.
So you do "% of global revenue", "gatekeeper/minimum size applicability" and so on. Absolutely trivial stuff, this has been figured out ages ago.
> You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech
Except Google pretty much doesn't operate in China and shareholders seem fine with that.
Entirely different from their EU operations to just give one example.
EU social welfare programs are all in a precarious state and the EU is currently taking on massive debts to re-arm again. Their economy is also not growing and China is eating their lunch economically (autos, manufacturing, industry).
Public opinion has turned so dramatically against big tech that triggering $10B in fines is like taking candy from a baby. Expect this to 10X by the end of the decade.
The incentive structure is there and the EU has already realized they can raid US companies in the name of 'privacy' without much pushback (hilariously, they're also constantly trying to undermine encryption at the same time...so we know they don't actually care about "privacy," just easy money).
GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 were released across the same time frame (staggered releases that affect users even within regions not withstanding) for EU and US customers.
ChatGPT Agents meanwhile had a three week delay, but that was not EU specific and affected other countries such as Switzerland as well. Previously, I have also seen the very much not EU UK included in such delayed releases.
Essentially, all recent LLM releases I am aware off either dropped simultaneously for EU and US customers or, if they were inaccessible within the EU early on, that generally included none-EU countries with different or no applicable regulation as well. Any example of differences in accessible features I know of hasn't been limited to EU member states.
Sora was the only outlier here, though as always, the restrictions did not encompass just the EU and were lifted shortly there after, just like with ChatGPT Agents:
> Right now, users can access Sora everywhere ChatGPT is available, with the exception of the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Economic Area. We are working to expand access further in the coming months.