Rules stop mattering when companies have the wealth of multiple entire nations combined.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Which means the fines must equal the wealth of at least one nation to matter. I'm all for that.
And any fines are essentially pennies that just get factored into the cost of doing business.
Yes fines should be a percentage for exp 5-20% of company valuation.
They should be however much the company made by breaking the rules, with a hefty addition included, inversely multiplied by the chance that the company was going to get caught.
For a company, deciding whether or not to break the law is a purely mathematical equation. If you can make $1M a day by breaking the law, there’s only a 1% chance per day that you’ll get caught, and the fine is only $5M? That’s a no brainer. To the company, they see a project with $1M income per day, a 99% success rate, and a $5M failure cost. All you need to do is go undetected for five days, and you’ve already made your money on the “investment”. Everything after that is pure profit.
So the fines should be adjusted to fit that model. Using those same numbers, the fine would be the $1M per day that the scheme was going (meaning any profit made is now completely forfeit), plus the $5M, multiplied by 99 because they only had a 1% chance of getting caught.
For a scheme that ran for 100 days before getting caught, (meaning they made $100M in profit) that fine would be a grand total of $10.395B… Not million. Billion. Because in order to deter companies from breaking the law, the punishment needs to account for the fact that the company is going to do the math on whether or not they’ll get caught, and what the fine is going to be. And when the company runs the numbers and decides that they have a 1% chance of getting caught, that should be a fucking terrifying number instead of just a slap on the wrist.
I say we start arresting board members until thing stop sucking. Death penalty on the table.
Death penalty is barbaric, lets not sink to that level.
The death penalty's only ethical application is when the subject is uncontainable by other means. The rich are proving that's exactly the type of criminals they are, and when they do get close to getting caught the one guy who's testimony could bury them mysteriously dies by 'suicide' at exactly the moment the cameras malfunction. I can't think of a cabal of crooks more deserving of the death penalty.
Of course they are, there aren't consequences.
Despite the general and indiscriminate scanning of people’s messages not being legal in the EU
Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap have already signaled in a joint statement to “continue to take voluntary action on our relevant Interpersonal Communication Services.” Whether this indicates continued scanning of our private communication is not entirely clear, but what is clear is that such activity would now risk breaching EU law. Then again, lack of compliance with EU data protection and privacy rules is nothing new for big tech in Europe.
It is utterly insane that any company thinks that they can ignore laws from at least two different continents and not only think they will get away with it, but are getting away with it, and doing it so blatantly, impetuously and with impunity.
They don't think. They know. They have carefully weighed the likeliness of repercussions vs to the profit to be made from doing it anyway. They have also weighed how likely it is they will face legal action and what the legal action will cost them. They have also also stacked the deck against the common user and any legislators that might want to hold them accountable through lobbying and other forms of coercion or bribery.
This is a well calculated "risk" vs reward for them.
I think they will get their noses bloodied sooner or later, and well deserved too
Wait, hasn’t the EU also been pushing for mandatory scanning of people’s messages FoR tHe cHiLdrEn?
Or were they just pushing for a backdoor in the encryption to enable selective scanning at a massive scale?
That's what the article linked is about. it was rejected, but Google, meta, snap etc.. said that they're going to scan anyway.
March into their campuses and start arresting executives and deleting servers at random until they comply.
This has the same energy as some medieval shit, a Protestant king ordering his army into a catholic monastery and burning all the books type shit. I’m here for it.
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie
Also, Vive la France
Somebody could sue under the CCPA.