<story><title>Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines</title><url>https://proton.me/blog/big-tech-2023-fines-vs-revenue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vnjxk</author><text>Could you imagine adding additional fine to shareholders? Like a reverse dividend? I wonder what disasters or blesses this will cause</text></item><item><author>hliyan</author><text>Either the fines need to be high enough until there is a material impact to shareholders, or natural persons who make decisions within the corporation needs to be held accountable (not just the legal person), OR, we need to fundamentally rethink what a corporation&amp;#x27;s charter must necessarily include (in addition to shareholder returns).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xur17</author><text>Fining shareholders would effectively force unlimited liability to shareholders, which comes with a bunch of negatives (ex: bigger shareholders would just own inside of an LLC wrapper).&lt;p&gt;Wouldn&amp;#x27;t fining more accomplish the same goal? If it was big enough, it would cause major drawdowns in the stock price, which would cause financial losses for the shareholders.</text></comment>
<story><title>Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines</title><url>https://proton.me/blog/big-tech-2023-fines-vs-revenue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vnjxk</author><text>Could you imagine adding additional fine to shareholders? Like a reverse dividend? I wonder what disasters or blesses this will cause</text></item><item><author>hliyan</author><text>Either the fines need to be high enough until there is a material impact to shareholders, or natural persons who make decisions within the corporation needs to be held accountable (not just the legal person), OR, we need to fundamentally rethink what a corporation&amp;#x27;s charter must necessarily include (in addition to shareholder returns).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devjab</author><text>Our entire western society depends on the ability to own and run businesses without personal responsibility for what the business does as an organisation. Sometimes in the case of fraud, or similar individual crimes within an organisation can be placed as blame on individuals or even management found to wilfully ignore internal warnings and so on, but on the whole, it’s rare that we go after private persons for what the organisations where they work does.&lt;p&gt;Shareholders are even further detached from this process, often having very little knowledge of what happens within organisations. Often having no influence on what happens within organisations. You likely own stock yourself through your pension funds, and if you made these laws your pension would be fined for what the index fonds it invest in does.&lt;p&gt;I guess from some political points of views all of this would be a good thing based on our current inequality in society, but the way to solve this isn’t through collective punishment. It’s through taxation. Right now, the entire economy is very much geared in favour of increasing the inequality by transferring more and more wealth to those who already have it. It hasn’t always been like this, 50 years ago, before the age of new public management, the taxation on things like wealth, stock and so on were high and the wealthy in our society paid most 80% of their total (not income tax) wealth generation. Today it’s often less than 10-20% through various tax law loop holes, and that’s if you keep your wealth generation absolutely legal.&lt;p&gt;Af far as organisation fines go, the situation is sort of similar to the general economy, in that major organisations and wealth owners have “rigged” the system in ways where it’s very hard to punish major corporations on a global scale. In Denmark we might find Facebook or Google guilty of something and fine them up to 10% of their income, but its income in Denmark, which is frankly so small on the global scale that they often don’t even bother fighting it in our courts like they do with the larger EU rulings. This could change, but it’s hard to do so, as the US isn’t interested in forcing US non-token companies fines to foreign countries. Similarly it would seem that even within the US there is competition between the various states to be the most company friendly.</text></comment>