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It’s not a mosquito, it’s a small kickback they agreed to over cocktails. They’re in bed with those who choose the fines.
When fines are set numbers and not percentages of profit, fines just become part of the business model.
When fines are set numbers and not percentages of
profitrevenue, fines just become part of the business model.FTFY
FTFY
*BTFY (broke that for you)
The problem with setting fines as a percentage of revenue is that it is far more punishing on some types of businesses than others, and it doesn’t treat all types of businesses equally. For example, let’s say you have a widget manufacturer and a fintech company, both found guilty of some anti-competitive violation and fined 20% of their annual revenue each.
The widget manufacturer might have billions in revenue but its material costs, operational expenses, and labour costs are much higher because manufacturing widgets is a very physical process. These costs can’t be cut to save money once the fine is paid, because the fewer workers you hire and the fewer raw materials you buy, the fewer widgets you make and the effect on revenue is much more direct.
In contrast, a fintech firm which has a similar level of revenue has far lower costs, meaning more of their revenue is either (1) profit, or (2) spent on non-production expenses like marketing or lobbying, both of which can be easily scaled back without immediate impact on revenue.
The consequence of this is that a 20% fine of revenue is devastating to the widget manufacturer, but it is just an inconvenience to the fintech company.
If there is one thing companies and rich people are good at regardless of their sector it’s making them appear poor on paper. Same reason Jeff Bezos got a 4k tax break for his childrens education or basically every block buster movie looses money.
Using profits as a metric makes it impossible to fine companies that run at a loss as business strategy. Tesla, Amazon, OpenAI. Just a few examples that got to where they are now by operating on the promise that someday they will be profitable. Or in case of Amazon to push competition out of the market.
Not every company that breaks laws makes a profit. But every company has a revenue.
If there is one thing companies and rich people are good at regardless of their sector it’s making them appear poor on paper
This is not true. Companies openly show themselves to be very rich on paper. What you’re thinking of is the systemic exploitation of tax loopholes to avoid tax liability. That’s not the same thing as “looking poor”.
Consider this document from Amazon (PDF). The company openly shows its net income to be some $30 billion in the first quarter of 2026.
The number reported to investors is extremely important and there is a voluminous amount of legislation to ensure it isn’t manipulated (accountants who help a company cook its books will lose their licences and could go to prison), because it’s the basis for shareholder decisions regarding the company’s stock. If there’s any number that the 1% will not allow to be manipulated, this is the one.
You are, however, correct that this does make it hard to punish a company that isn’t currently profitable. But that’s really just pushing against the limits of what a monetary fine is even capable of achieving, because you will eventually run into the problem of it being impossible to draw blood from a stone.
A better way to approach this is to fine companies a portion of their equity. So a company which is hit with a 10% equity fine means that 10 new “golden shares” of the company are minted and passed into the possession of the Government, while the remaining shares of the company (owned by its shareholders) now only represent a 90% ownership stake. The golden shares would represent a fixed amount of equity and cannot be diluted by the issuance of more stock. They can be disposed of, or they can become an investment to fund things like social programmes and public pension funds.
Fining companies a portion of their equity, in my opinion, is the most effective way to punish them, because it goes directly after the line which is supposed to go up. Suddenly, a 10% fine means line go down 10%. That’s a huge incentive not to do the thing that results in a fine.
Amazon paid zero taxes in 2021.
So firstly, that doesn’t matter, because net income is one of the most regulated figures in financial history, and manipulating it has got people into extremely deep trouble. Even rich people. If Amazon paid zero tax, which in most years, it doesn’t, then it is because of the manipulation of tax loopholes, not because of net income manipulation.
Secondly, I don’t advocate for monetary fines as a way to punish corporate lawbreaking at all. No matter what system you choose to calculate fines, there will always be problems with it. There’s a more creative way to go about it.
You might notice that it’s possible to put humans who break laws in jail, but not companies. But there’s a punishment you can inflict on a company that you can’t inflict on a human: you can confiscate part of their existence. The way that would work is a fine denominated in the equity of the company. So a 10% equity fine would mean that 10 new “golden shares” of the company get minted and pass into the possession of the Government, while the remaining common and preferred stock of the company now only represents 90% ownership.
This sort of fine would result in a direct 10% decrease in the stock price of the company, as the holder of the golden shares is now entitled to 10% of the company’s dividends and gets 10% of the votes in corporate elections. Since the golden shares each represent a fixed percentage of equity, they cannot be watered down by the issuance of more stock. The golden shares can either be disposed of or they can become an investment for the state pension fund/sovereign wealth fund.
Since it seems that all stockholders and executives care about nowadays is to make the line go up, forcing the line to go down directly is a great way to discourage the behaviour that results in the line going down.
Your approach of making fines payable in equity might be an interesting way for the UK to renationalise the infamously underperforming private water monopolies. They incur fines all the time for things like pumping sewage into the waterways.
I don’t think they’d use this mechanism though, the whole point of water privatisation was to keep the much-needed infrastructure upgrades off the government’s books and nationalisation in general would subvert this goal. The glaring flaw in that plan is that the regional private monopolies didn’t do the needed upgrades either, and instead paid massive bonuses to their senior managers.
Ok but then just don’t do shit that will get you fined. It’s not that complicated, really.
This is a bad line of reasoning to use in penal law. Have a look at the legal code of Draco of Athens (after whose name an interesting adjective was coined meaning “excessively harsh”). Why was it so harsh? Well, in Draco’s view, all the minor crimes deserved death. It’s not that complicated, really. If you don’t want to die, don’t steal cabbages.
A company is not a living being with feelings and emotions. Fuck your argument. Fuck the greedy companies.
But we’re not talking about punishing the little people for minor crimes. We’re talking about antitrust laws, which is not something that affects mom and pop shops. Those laws are meant to protect all consumers and should absolutely be punished very harshly no matter who breaks them, otherwise it just makes it okay if you make up for it by milking the public enough to compensate for the fine.
What absurd hyperbole.
What a worthless comment.
Capital punishment for C-suite level executives. People make these decisions and then hide behind the concept of corporations. Hold people accountable.
I would settle for capital punishment for the corporation. Board dissolved. All assets sold at public auction with a pure lottery, so asshats can’t depend on buying any key asset. All stock voided.
Could really get everyone on the same page about respecting the rule of law.
If corporations can get the benefits of legal personhood, then they should be subject to the penalties too.
Any real accountability would be great.
In addition to percentage based fines levied against the business, I feel that executives, board members, and major voting shareholders also need to face legal consequences.
GDPR sets the example:
20 million euros
Or
4% of your revenue
Whichever is higher
4%? Nah, set it to 20% at the bare minimum. First one who gets hit with one fifth of their revenue getting yoinked away by the government would get everyone else in line.
4% of your revenue is a lot for a low-margin business, which is most of them. google’s margin is like 40% though.
How about 20%, or issue the equivalent value in shares and hand them to to the state. Shareholders’ choice. Fuck up repeatedly and the state uses their control to replace senior management.
that’s not very neoliberal of you
Then set the percentage based on the margin? Something that would genuinely hurt without simply dismantling the business, so there’s still something left to correct itself?
Creative accounting would just make the margin zero for the purposes of the calculation. It’s a lot harder to magic away total revenue
Also the purpose of the fine is not intended to be a slap on the wrist, it’s intended to be a strong deterrent to ensure companies do everything they can to ensure the law is followed. Most companies won’t take the risk of skipping compliance on something that could wipe the business out
Why don’t we want to dismantle the business?
It’s always fun when you run into a neoliberal in the wild. They can condone a lot of things like mass incarceration, crippling poverty, corrupt Justice systems, and of course genocide. Hurting a business though? That they can’t imagine.
Now this, THIS is absurd hyperbole. When you have to make massive assumptions about someone to make your point, you don’t have a point - you’re just making shit up.
Hm, sounds like 20% would make for a good deterrent, then.
Or 100% of money made in abusive position?
wouldnt that mean smaller companies that hurt way less people would suffer more from the fine than bigger companies?
Fines need to be a percentage of gross income, so there’s no artificially suppressing the fine like they do their taxes.
Lets see how long it takes to fix them if they’re paying 1% of their yearly intake daily as long as they’re out of compliance.
And compounding for multiple offenses
Flick or fuck?
I had an old Archie comic (WHERE EVERY WORD IS IN ALL CAPS!) where the word FLICK appeared. There was slight smearing of the print. Sure looked like the word FUCK to me at the time.
Fines for corporations should be a percentage of their revenue. Google getting fined 25% of their total net worth would get them complying real fucking quick.
Even with the small fines, constant fines could add up. Why else did Google and other tech companies support Trump? They are pissed during the Biden administration of the aggressive antitrust cases by the FTC under Lina Khan.
