If you believe that the penalty for Seagate is too low, lobby the government for stricter penalties (most politicians should be receptive, I’d have thought).
If you believe the settlement for Fox is too high, ask their lawyers why they went for it.
Except for one being a defamation case and the other being an export violation case these are apples to apples comparisons. These are both civil violations and these are both negotiated deals between the parties.
Fox News managed to settle for about half of what the case was asking for which is likely very decent to deal for them as I think they would have lost big time and you never know what a jury will award in a case like this. They got a pretty safe deal although quite costly.
Seagate on the other hand was given the deal of a lifetime for their violation. If you look up the maximum penalties allowed to be sought it is twice the amount of the transaction which is the basis for the violation. Reading the article the violation is 1.1 billion dollars. So the maximum penalty should have been 2.2 billion. They were let off with a measly 300 million.
This is not about a lobbying the government for stiffer penalties, because those penalties are on the books already, this is about the government giving Seagate a sweetheart deal because people in the department of commerce are setting up future positions to work in companies like this. I would suggest you take a long hard look and you see where a bureaucrats that work for these government organizations go to once they leave these organizations.
The judge didn't force the settlement - just let people on both sides figure out what the range of likely outcomes was. Then both sides chose to give up their best-case outcome in order to avoid their worst-case outcome.
The question under discussion was, could the government put pressure on Dominion to drop the suit. Well, who would put that pressure on? Not the judicial branch.
APAC.
All politicians are corrupt.