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I understand the impetus to make the story about liberty, but this is not a "new government entity" "suddenly" appearing. Dish is in the business of satellite communications. That field is strictly regulated by the FCC. The company applied for permission before launch, then later applied permission to modify their authorisation, and they themselves reported the discrepancy at the end of mission.
There is nothing "sudden" about this.
> Was there even a trial?
No. There wasn't. To quote from the consent decree: "The Company and the Bureau subsequently engaged in settlement negotiations. To resolve this matter, the Company and the Bureau enter into this Consent Decree and agree to the following terms and conditions." That is to say this is a settlement.
> Or did some guys get together in a room and decide you should just pay them,
Yes. Some "guys" from the bureau and some from the company got together in a room.
> without any consultation?
No. The representatives of the company were in the room. The general counsel of the company signed the consent decree.
If they couldn't be bothered to put enough fuel in the cannister to deorbit, they get fined. I don't see why that requires a full trial.
Is the theory that the company is going to ignore this? That seems implausible; I'm guessing that they're scrambling to avoid further problems and make sure the relationship with their regulator is good. From the regulator's perspetive, what benefit would it do to actually put them out of business, or to seriously wound them, or scare them more? Or, are we trying to establish a precedent that "you may be seriously damaged even upon first infraction"? Is that the behavior we want companies to anticipate - that the government will attack super hard upon first infraction? If that's what we want, okay. But to me that seems too strong, since there are tons of laws and rules with arbitrary enforcement; given that it makes sense that when agencies get involved, they initially fire warning shots like this so companies know someone is paying attention. Then in a month, if the company hasn't taken serious steps to solve this, the regulators can start nuking companies who don't comply. I'm definitely pro regulation, but there's a trade-off because companies need to know the rules so they can plan, budget, consult, etc. so having this initial trigger that working to figure out what is allowed/forbidden/etc is good. Companies pre-emptively being extremely scared will have huge costs (money/environmental/speed), too, especially when it's for things which don't matter or which agencies don't actually care about.
Companies do have a choice in many cases, so being super aggro against them isn't really beneficial. If they can be reined in by threats+negotiation, while still doing business here (within our oversight) it seems ideal.
While I agree at you that this isnt the adtech buisness staffed by ghouls that see fines as a cost of doing buisness, the idea of adding to space debris is rightfully met with horror, so any amount of money short of compoany-ending will be seen as people getting off lightly
Please don't assume that by discussing the appropriate level of initial fine in an interaction between a company and a regulatory agency, that I'm saying government doesn't have a role here. That does not follow at all.
I'm more questioning the presumption in this comment section that the regulator should have been harsher to start with.
To me it seems natural that a referee in an interaction will start off gently saying "hey, I'm paying attention to this issue now, here's a minor fine, but watch out" so the players know to care. If they continue misbehaving, they'll start being thrown out of the game.
But saying that the ref should start off his first enforcement with seriously damaging penalties doesn't seem reasonable. Nearly every sport in practice involves a gap between the rules "as written" and the rules as "as enforced" - i.e. fouling, traveling in the NBA, strike zone in MLB. In all of these cases, players need 1) knowledge of what's going on in this game and 2) consistency from the ref so they can adjust and not be outplayed.
Why don't refs always enforce rules to the max? To me this is a key aspect of human systems, the human freedom of refs as people to adjust to make things work well, especially when the rules as written are insane or incorrect, and are extremely hard to change upstream (due to government/publicity/etc) problems, in addition to just plain incompetence in congress.
i.e. "The NBA won't redefine the traveling rule to reflect reality, but refs enforce the 'real' rule which is used on playgrounds, and everyone knows the level of enforcement that will be used in each situation, even though refs never actually write it down."
You may want an exact match between rules/laws & enforcement, but it doesn't work that way with human referees. Same thing here. Enforcement is a kind of communication and negotiation between parties; starting off by nuking the company will scare them so badly, others will abandon the space or the US due to the harshness. Also, the discussions that come out of this will be things like "what's an efficient way for the company to do what the agency wants? Keep in mind our restrictions here (e.g. every rocket launch also has some harm/risk to your priorities; is there a way we can help all of our concerns from within the multiple ways to solve this issue?)"