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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

Technology corporations have been blatantly breaking European law for the past 15 years, and received multiple billion-dollar fines for it. Car manufacturers have committed fraud to deceive regulators into believing their products comply with emission standards.

What "good faith" are you talking about?

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None of those organizations are OpenAI, which has yet to establish a history of dishonest dealing. It's not usually a good idea for government agencies to assume that every company in a particular field is maximally dishonest and criminally inclined.

The goal is compliance, not punishment. So it's better to give them a chance to comply, a warning, and then prosecute and fine if they continue to flout the rules.

Switching entire business models to exploit the market, after receiving goodwill contributions/collaborations under their nonprofit model already sets a bad precedent.

So I don't think they have a clean record now, and people are simply wise to be skeptical.

What reasonable action could they take to satisfy your skepticism?

> It's not usually a good idea for government agencies to assume that every company in a particular field is maximally dishonest and criminally inclined.

Depends what you mean by "maximally." I think it's safe to assume that every company tries to maximize dishonesty after accounting for its cost (i.e. fines).

Way more than 15 years lol. Corporations skirt laws all the time. In the US they just don't get punished for it because it's bad for the market.

Good faith that maybe they fixed it this time, and that even a multi-national company doesn’t have the stones to bold face lie to a government, when they’re under scrutiny for past deception.

Without some level of good faith, there’s no path back for organisations. The only acceptable form of remediation would be dissolving the company entirely, which huge impacts on many people.

Certainly past regulation has been a little toothless. But laws like GDPR with their maximum set as a percentage of global revenue show that governments are catching up. Those fines can be large enough to inflict real pain and damage to corporations that repeatedly misbehave.

> Those fines can be large enough to inflict real pain and damage to corporations that repeatedly misbehave.

To my knowledge, such a large fine has never been imposed in 5 years, despite rampant noncompliance across the entire industry, including Big Tech, with countless complaints having been filed but gone nowhere.

There’s site tracking the fines: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

Already on the first page I found a case (ETid-1788) where the operator of a public toilet was fined for installing a hidden camera inside a toilet stall(!!!) to secretly record people who used it.

The fine was 25,000 Euros. That's insane. That business should have been closed down and the responsible person jailed. GDPR enforcement is a joke.

This seems to be a fine for an individual, "Accused: A**, born on XXX"

https://www-ris-bka-gv-at.translate.goog/Dokumente/Dsk/DSBT_...

Individuals don't run public toilets normally. My guess is the accused is the owner of the business that operates those toilets.

That fine is just for the GDPR aspect the case. Authorities or the victims would pursue criminal or civil cases against the company or the individual who installed the camera for the other unrelated aspects.

To me it appears to be an indirect form of taxation.

While the EU can't make corporations pay their share of taxes, it can at least rely on them willing to break the law rather than change their business model.

I don't if that's really the case though.

That's always a concern with law enforcement. I say "concern" because it creates perverse incentives for the enforcing body. An extreme case is civil forfeiture, where in some states police depts get to keep the lion share of the seized goods.

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