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Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again.

Eh, utterly impractical but I still think there should be a way to "jail" corporations. Easy - "Your offices are closed for the duration of the sentence. Your systems are shut down for the duration. Automatic payments set up in advance can continue as long as there are funds in your bank accounts, but your staff will not be monitoring them. You can appoint someone external to the organization to take care of some obligations."

Survivable as a business for short enough sentences (effectively comparable to a devastating ransomware attack), but mighty painful and anyone involved will absolutely feel the wrath of ownership/shareholders.

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I would say: fire the C level executives, with no severance. At the same time halt all stock trading.

Have the top officers who remain put their division on the auction block to the highest bidder, on a sold twice system, best deal wins. That is the company as a whole is sold, in parallel all divisions are sold separately: then add up the different bids, and whoever paid more: whole company vs all the individual departments separate wins. Although there are conflicts of interests, I think the officers who remain should both be allowed to bid, and also consult to other bidders: but the consults must be in public as are their bids.

Shareholders are treated as if the company is bankrupt: government fines, remaining employees, banks, and then the lawyers all get paid. If there is money left over shareholders get it.

I believe the best penalty for a big company is really to be broken up. It doesn't penalize the people working on the company or its clients, since the business continue, but it does penalize the management and board of the company for their misbehavior.

Except if the broken up companies then start trimming staff because of the uncertainty of operating with corporate daddy any more. What was a stable company now becomes unstable and the ultimately, it is the employees that suffer

Would you rather have an unstable company or an unstable industry, or even an unstable society if certain abuses go unchecked for long enough? And being without a job is less painful when there are more companies competing with each other and incentivized to innovate and therefore grow.

I was just pointing out that at the end of the day, it is the employees that pay the price for the leadership being asshats.

I want people that dictate that a company does evil to pay the same price as if they were doing the same thing without the corporate shield. If felons lose the right to vote and are prevented from other rights afforded to other citizens, then corporate felons should also lose rights like never being able to lead a company, pay fines, as well as possibly being a guest of the state.

This would be disproportionately used as a tool against extremely small corporations without the budget to fight the "sentence" or weather out even a short shutdown.

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