Source:
CFPB Orders Apple and Goldman Sachs to Pay Over $89 Million for Apple Card Failures
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-order...
CFPB Orders Apple and Goldman Sachs to Pay Over $89 Million for Apple Card Failures
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-order...
If the fine is too low, it’s just absorbed as a “cost of doing business” and ceases to be a deterrent.
That's a reasonable position to hold, but crappy comparisons like in the OP doesn't contribute little to the discussion. The fine might be tiny part of worldwide revenue, but how much money are they making off apple cards? If that's tiny as well then the argument is moot.
I disagree. I don’t think the fine should be relative to money gained by breaking a rule. Then it’s not a deterrent for large companies.
You end up in a situation where very large companies can act in illegal ways and just absorb the fine.
A company doing anything worth fining should be fined relative to the size of that company (by some metric)
Sorry, I’m not sure I follow. How would selling products to smaller countries automatically incur fines for illegal activity?
I wish I lived in your world.
> but shit happens and despite their best efforts they might still get fined.
You’re telling me that it’s okay that laws are sometimes broken with no real consequence because the company in question may mistakenly break laws?
Yikes…
> Under your proposed regime of a "deterrent", that would put them at risk of fines worth 5% (or whatever) of their global revenue
I don’t know if revenue is the exact metric to use to making a deterring fine. It very well may not be.
But the fine should act as some real deterrent
> All 40k Liechtensteiners are worse off as a result. This isn't a hypothetical. It's happening in EU right now, as Apple doesn't want to deal with the legal headaches associated with Apple Intelligence and therefore opts out of the EU market entirely.
This is a very complex topic and I don’t feel well equipped to discuss it with any real nuance.
But here I go anyway…
I’m not convinced that not having access to Apple intelligence makes a country worse off.
Not all countries need to be supported by a large corporation. That’s not strictly a good thing.
If they (the EU) wanted that, they’d lax their regulations…
So the solution is to make breaking laws not truly punished?
Seems like companies should be damn sure they’re not breaking laws…
Of course not every fine needs to put the company in danger of bankruptcy.
Fines could start relatively small and grow quickly and exponentially with repeated offenses.
But they should act as a real deterrent.
If a company with $1B in revenue, rolls something out to make $10M, then anything over $10M is suitable punishment - you turned a profitable venture into a money losing venture.
But if that company was $1T then that fine is effectively the cost of legal research. It won’t deter that company from trying to weasel their way around regulations in the future as the cost of trying justifies the potential upside.
That seems like a reasonable approach.
By your logic, if a company is running at a loss should the fine be negative?
Sure, but I don’t think just causing any amount of loss acts as a deterrent. Especially if the company is large enough to absorb the loss with no real consequences.
> By your logic, if a company is running at a loss should the fine be negative?
No, that’s a dumb question. A negative fine isn’t a fine and isn’t a deterrent…
I don’t know what metric one should use to determine how to make a fine a deterrent. Maybe market cap?
But the point of a fine is to be a deterrent.
Is it? Or is it purely to make the action a net negative?
Making an action a net negative _can_ act as a deterrent as in the $1B case earlier.
The issue is that, at a certain scale, the risk of simply having an action be a net negative may be worth the potential upside.
I honestly don’t understand what’s so disagreeable about this idea.
What else would a fine be other than a serious deterrent to an illegal action? A mild annoyance?
What else could the point be? I guess social retribution? But that’s just pointless.
I agree there, but if you're going to come up with a system of fines to incentivize not breaking the law, it needs to make sense.
Just making it a huge numbers is likely to not even pass muster in the courts.
A $10B company paying a $1B fine for sending out spam mail to 10 customers would be seen as "cruel and unusual punishment".
I’d like to live in a world where fines are deterrents, though.
To me that says EU is doing the right thing.