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?
Like some European country(s) do with personal fines, afaik.