Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

They have to book EU revenue somewhere in the EU, so it's entirely knowable how much they make.

This is also why the fines are based on revenue, to avoid transfer pricing shenanigans.

If I do a crime, I go to jail. If a corporation does a crime, they only need to pay a small fine.

Not to mention that they have many thousands of people working for them doing crimes on their behalf for which are never caught and never punished. Just the scale of a corporation, makes it impossible to prevent crime. They are crime factories by design.

If a nation state kills someone, it's not called murder. If a corporation commits fraud, it's not called fraud... So long as they don't run out of money.

Corporations can influence laws in ways that I can't. I can't even talk to a politician.

Corporations have far better access to government contracts and the tender process than regular citizens. There is subtle, but harmful corruption constantly taking place behind the scenes.

Not only that, but the people who work for corporations are, to some extent, shielded from the crimes that they commit on behalf of corporations as it limits their liability by design, not to mention all the opportunities for cover ups and deflection of liability that they provide. It absorbs and neutralizes liability. Nobody ends up taking responsibility. The crimes keep getting more frequent; corporations keep finding people who are more and more desperate and willing to commit crimes on their behalf. People create shell companies just to launder borrowed money to corporations, in the hope that they will get a well paid corporate job from them after their shell company runs out of money... The list of schemes/crimes is endless and beyond my imagination.

The first corporations ended up bankrupt. E.g. Both Dutch and British East India Company, South Sea Company, Mississippi Company... They ALL turned into bubbles and collapsed spectacularly, every single time. That was before the fiat monetary system came along and started propping them all up... Now the scam never ends. The entire economy is fully monopolized by these proven scam constructs. They suck up all opportunities and produce cheap, low quality products... but because they take away opportunities from everyone, nobody who isn't a corporate shareholder has surplus income and are therefore forced to buy cheap, low quality corporate products.

There exist other classes with actual post-buy liabilities, e.g. stock options, as one particularly unlucky poor sod discovered at the start of the 2020 plaguefest [1], but normally these are (supposed to be) heavily gated for actually qualified investors for precisely that reason.

Personally, I'd keep it that way... and nationalize companies that can't pay their fees, without paying out the shareholders. That way, the shareholders get punished, the jobs created by the company aren't lost, and the government gains something of value.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/17/20-y...