We really, really need to enshrine in law the idea that fines be proportional to the size of the entity being fined.

[mayintoronto@beige.party]

@mhoye That would certainly help to rein in any inflated market caps.

[autkin@fosstodon.org]

@mhoye maybe money are not even the right tool, maybe you want punchholes on the license of sort, and maybe holes should go on each executive's and directors' board member's personal license as well as impersonal corporate one

[misusecase@twit.social]

@mhoye Sliding scale fines but for corporations

Then maybe we can talk about the death penalty for corporations

[millihertz@oldbytes.space]

@mhoye a fine of 250% of annual profits would certainly make a company pay attention.

it'd probably help out a government's bottom line too

[brad@1040ste.net]

@mhoye Always been a fan of parking and other traffic (esp. speeding) tickets being a percentage of the arsehole's annual income.

[lienrag@mastodon.tedomum.net]

@mhoye

That's GDPR.

[tijn@dosgame.club]

@mhoye It's an incredibly basic point to make, but if a company made more money with a crime than they have to pay in fines, then that crime is worth it.

It's just a tax on crime, but not in any way an incentive to stop doing crimes. It makes business-sense to keep doing the crime.

[datarama@hachyderm.io]

@millihertz @mhoye It's easy for a multinational corporation to make their profits look as small as they want to. This is the reason Burger King and Coca-Cola don't pay any corporation taxes here in Denmark; they keep posting 0 profits year after year (though their workers' wages are taxed). They simply adjust the various "fees" they have to pay to franchise owners, various internal suppliers etc. so it lines up perfectly and they officially make no profits. Also, a company like eg. OpenAI makes *negative* profit.

This is why some of the EU privacy and antitrust laws fine percentages of *revenue* rather than profit. (This would actually *completely* thrash companies like OpenAI or early Uber.)

[millihertz@oldbytes.space]

@datarama @mhoye this is all true - but there's no reason, other than a lack of will, that jurisdictions can't substitute their own definitions of profit where advantageous (eg. shareholder dividends paid by parent corportations)

but yes, until that happens, percentage of revenue is harder (though not impossible) to fiddle

[isaackuo@spacey.space]

@EricFielding @mhoye Maybe base it on maximum market cap in the past three decades, adjusted for inflation.

And none of the 2% stuff. Try more like 90%, payable from actual individual people, not corporate coffers. The punishment needs to affect individual human beings, to be a threat to the actual human beings who make the decisions.