Don’t you think stronger consequences than that should happen when a company unintentionally discloses tens of millions of people’s personally identifiable information that has been collected without any particularly explicit permission given by those people?
Credit agencies hold a special place in the US economy, and when they messed up this badly, the team threat of some near-going-out-of-business level consequences seem like the only way to truly get other companies to take this seriously. Especially considering that there are other credit agencies in the country - they don’t have a monopoly on this.