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Two senators say a $5B fine isn’t enough to punish Facebook

arstechnica.com

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Re: Two senators say a $5B fine isn’t enough to punish Facebook

#111

Post by crankylinuxuser »

yeahitslikethat wrote: post #56
LanceH wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about just jail the programmers and engineers since they are the only ones who ever have a record of what went on.

Wouldn't be the first time programmers were the only ones to do time for a company's crimes. But when I'm asked to implement robosigning and push back now I'm the bad guy. I won't do it, but another dev did against my and the other developer's advice. He'll be fine I'm sure. No one will notice.

And it's not hard at all to see different pieces done, which individually do not make a crime. However these 10 pieces (read: Agile cards) do make illegal actions possible.

The management approved this, and the devs worked on it. The devs certainly didn't execute said code. Now, if they were discussing "this feature allows fraud but we're going to do it anyway" over jira or email, roast'em.

Re: Two senators say a $5B fine isn’t enough to punish Facebook

#112

Post by tptacek »

ionised wrote: post #104
tptacek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and how does a $5B fine not accomplish that? It's not like any smaller company can look at this and say "well, the total valuation of all firms pursuing these activities is larger than the fine, so it's rational to continue doing that". By all means, fine every company that does this $5B, though.

It may deter smaller firms. It's won't deter Facebook.

Why won't a $5B fine deter Facebook? That's a huge amount of money, even to Facebook. More importantly: it is almost surely a giant multiple of the revenue Facebook obtained from the specific behavior that violated the consent decree.

Re: Two senators say a $5B fine isn’t enough to punish Facebook

#113

Post by idlewords »

tptacek wrote: post #37

This is kind of alarming to me. A fine should scale with the the greater of the harm done and the amount needed to deter the behavior. But that's not what's happening here; instead, people are proposing that the fine scale with Facebook's total revenue. Even Facebook's most ardent critics probably don't believe they derive a majority (or really even a significant amount) of revenue from the lax API controls companies…

The problem being solved here is not "punish Facebook" but "make the tech oligopoly take the FTC seriously." The fine has to bite to achieve that goal.

Re: Two senators say a $5B fine isn’t enough to punish Facebook

#114

Post by tptacek »

idlewords wrote: post #113
tptacek wrote: post #37

This is kind of alarming to me. A fine should scale with the the greater of the harm done and the amount needed to deter the behavior. But that's not what's happening here; instead, people are proposing that the fine scale with Facebook's total revenue. Even Facebook's most ardent critics probably don't believe they derive a majority (or really even a significant amount) of revenue from the lax API controls companies…

The problem being solved here is not "punish Facebook" but "make the tech oligopoly take the FTC seriously." The fine has to bite to achieve that goal.

I don't disagree even a little bit. My position is that this fine is of a scale that has teeth at virtually every company in America. I remain frustrated, however, that people generally believe that an existential fine is called for, since the underlying conduct was not itself existential to Facebook.

If we passed a law outlawing targeted advertisement driven by behavior tracking, and Facebook ignored that law, a $20B fine would be reasonable to me. And I'd be OK with that law!

Re: Two senators say a $5B fine isn’t enough to punish Facebook

#115

Post by int_19h »

stevenjohns wrote: post #63
adventured wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean first fines pretty much have to scale with total revenue to deter behavior That's only an effective approach if your goal is to cripple many of the companies that you fine. Almost no large companies on the planet have the extreme profit margins of Facebook. Alternatively to avoid that kind of damage you have to adjust the percentage scale to each individual company's profit margins (25% revenue fine for Face…

> That's only an effective approach if your goal is to cripple many of the companies that you fine Yes, some companies should be crippled. With criminal sentencing, the first goal is to isolate that person from society as a punishment with reform being a second consideration. With criminals, judges or magistrates would level higher-end sentences as an example and you won't hear many people arguing against a criminal'…

> With criminal sentencing, the first goal is to isolate that person from society as a punishment with reform being a second consideration

A lot of people would argue that this is the root of most problems in our justice system.

Re: Two senators say a $5B fine isn’t enough to punish Facebook

#116

Post by int_19h »

Angostura wrote: post #41
salimmadjd wrote: post #26

my cynical side says there is more to this. I think FB is a major threat to the distribution of news that is mostly owned and controlled by the mainstream media owners. I think this is all part of forcing FB to come to the negotiation table, and negotiate banning more independent information sources to make these fines go away.

I don't think Fox News really cares about Facebook

I think that of all the news companies, Fox is probably the one that would care most, since they have the largest proportion of the audience that's only there for the daily outrage.

Re: Two senators say a $5B fine isn’t enough to punish Facebook

#117

Post by arthur_pryor »

tptacek wrote: post #114
idlewords wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem being solved here is not "punish Facebook" but "make the tech oligopoly take the FTC seriously." The fine has to bite to achieve that goal.

I don't disagree even a little bit. My position is that this fine is of a scale that has teeth at virtually every company in America. I remain frustrated, however, that people generally believe that an existential fine is called for, since the underlying conduct was not itself existential to Facebook. If we passed a law outlawing targeted advertisement driven by behavior tracking, and Facebook ignored that law, a $20…

> If we passed a law outlawing targeted advertisement driven by behavior tracking, and Facebook ignored that law, a $20B fine would be reasonable to me. And I'd be OK with that law!

i think i would really like that law.

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