this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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Showerthoughts

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I was just reading about a violation of the Canadian fisheries act that has a maximum penalty of $200k, and realized the absurdity of there ever being a maximum fine.

There should be no maximum fine on any corporate penalty given that we do not cap the size of corporations or their bank accounts.

It would be like having maximum jail terms of 25 years for immortal beings that can live to 10,000.

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[–] JelleWho@lemmy.world 136 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Corporate fines should be in % of the company income.

I would also argue that personal fines should be like that too.

[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 87 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

All fines should be a percentage of income. Otherwise we have what we call a poor tax on people who can’t afford it, and “the price of doing business” for people who can. And I’m not referring to just companies.

[–] jtrek@startrek.website 39 points 1 week ago (4 children)

It has to be worth, not just income. There's too many loopholes around "I don't have income I just have stock I use as collateral for a loan" or "I don't have income but my LLC happens to pay for all of my daily expenses".

But yes, all fines need to scale with the perpetrator. The more dollars you have, the less each dollar means.

A $100 ticket for parking on a crosswalk means nothing to a millionaire, but is potentially ruinous for someone living in poverty. It needs to hurt the same for everyone. The millionaire should have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. They need to feel pain.

A lot of people are really shitty and operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning. It's just "did I get punished?".

[–] ComradePenguin@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

Can be solved like this: A percentile/percentage of wealth or percentage of income. Whichever is highest.

[–] Janx@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago

I don't have income but my LLC happens to pay for all of my daily expenses

That's income. Not according to tax laws, but that's also why we shouldn't base monetary penalties on tax law. These fuckers have been exploiting the loopholes to have the most money and power and also pay almost nothing. But they still eat! And grocery stores don't accept leveraged loans, securities, Bitcoin, or percentages of annuities... At some point, they touch money. So let's tax (and penalize) them so they can't avoid paying their fair share.

[–] Tiger666@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Good luck getting that to happen anywhere but Scandinavian countires.

[–] ceiphas@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We Bad a millionaire jerk in germany that printed bis own license plate so he didnt need to drill holes in bis Porsche. The fee was 30000€ iirc. Because traffic fees are mostly income based here

[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

Steve Jobs would exploit a California loophole that says new cars didn’t require a license plate, so he would lease a new car every 6 months to avoid license plates.

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[–] foggy@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

A friend shared a memory of his drug dealer dad, when they were in vegas, lost a ton of money gambling and flipped the fuck out. Started smashing vases.

Security approached. He threw hundred dollar bills at them. They started handing him more vases.

[–] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Not income, global revenue of the parent company, like GDPR does it

So if Google fucks up, it’s the full revenue of Alphabet Inc that determines the fine.

That way you can’t found GDPR Violation Incorporated and do your shady stuff there risk free.

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Meanwhile, Google is illegally chopping down a forest to make space for a data centre. Those fines should be proportional to revenue too. That would teach them not to mess around with trees.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

trees are different. malicious removal of them for profits is even worse. the fine should also be recurring, and paid-in-full annually until that forest is restored to its former condition.

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

So… about 100-200 years?

[–] tempest@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Has anyone actually got hit with big gdpr fines?

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[–] CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Operate fines should be a % of income + the amount of illegal gains. Most times the fines today are much lower than the amount of profit they make from committing the crimw

[–] anewfox@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

fines should be levied against the company itself while the c-levels get arrested for the crimes they orchestrated. if you or i committed even a fraction of the crimes that c-levels get away with, we'd be in prison for the rest of our lives.

[–] CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Damn straight

[–] LouNeko@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

*Networth

You fuck up badly, better be ready to liquidate some assets.

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Isn't that what European laws are now doing?

[–] ol_capt_joe@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

And that's for offense 1.

Offense 2 within 5 years of the first would be same as offense 1, plus losing the right to pay dividends and issue derivatives for a year.

Offense 3 within 5 years of the second would be same as 1 and 2, plus you get restructured as a nonprofit.

Offense 4 within 5 years of the third would be the entire management board's and executive team's browser, chat, email, and dating app history gets published...

[–] thfi@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 1 week ago

Some (too few) laws have such fines. One example is the European Union's Digital Services Act which states: Fines up to 1% of the worldwide annual turnover can be imposed.

Fines for natural persons based on income and wealth are rare, but exist. Finland and its traffic violations is one example. The story is that happiness was great when a senior executive of Nokia was caught for such a violation some years ago whe n Nokia was still relevant.

[–] Etterra@discuss.online 18 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I've been saying it for years and years now, fines need to be proportionate to a person's or company's assets and earnings.

[–] CAPSLOCKED@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

or a running net percentage. 1% of net income so long as the penalty applies. google tore down a forest without permits, how about 1% of net profits until the forest is restored

[–] KeithD@lemmy.nz 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Gross profits. Because they can absolutely manipulate the net. And do.

[–] TheArtfulLlama@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Agreed. I think they should be a percentage of that sort of thing. Ive heard wealthy people say “xyz isn’t illegal, you just have to pay a fine.” Like…huh? The uber wealthy aren’t a part of this planet, that’s just insane to say.

[–] immutable@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

There is already a well defined legal remedy that is used against regular people that commit financial crimes.

Treble damages are a legal remedy where a court multiplies a plaintiff's actual, proven compensatory damages by three.

This should be the bare minimum for corporations. Corporations are legal people but not actual people, they are soulless machines that seek profit, the only way to deter them from criminality is to make crime unprofitable. Anything less is inviting them to do crime and pay a fine because doing so generates a profit.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah; we very obvious need to move to gross-revenue-based fines. Megacorps can effectively ignore dollar-value fines, since even the maximal amounts are so relatively minuscule that they’re simply seen and handled as an OpEx line item, so there’s effectively zero deterrence factor.

[–] lost_faith@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago

I've said for years the fines should start with the revenue from said act, then have a serious fine on top of it, like maybe 50%. So, company makes $1 billion breaking the law, the fine is $1.5 billion. Second offence 100%, so $2 billion for this scenario. Obviously the second offence would be something different with a different revenue, but still the second offence is revenue + 100% of revenue. Third offence, nationalize the company.

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I saw a comment suggesting companies should "go to jail" like a criminal would, and you have them limit how much they are allowed to interact with the public world until their sentence is up.

I think it's a pretty interesting way to deal with it. It makes sense for retribution and it forces companies to have cash on hand to cover costs while "locked up" to cover costs. It would really make businesses risk averse.

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[–] CombatWombat@feddit.online 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When we talk about prison reform, we talk about the three main functions of prison: incapacitation, rehabilitation and deterrence. Corporate persons are conceptual, amoral agents incapable of personal growth, so I don't think rehabilitation is a useful lens for thinking about corporate fines, but I think deterrence and incapacitation are worthwhile. Fines as a percentage of corporate income speaks to incapacitation -- a corporation with less money can do less harm -- but it doesn't address deterrence. In a perfectly efficient capitalist economy, we should expect that corporations will take any option that nets more revenue than it costs to implement, inclusive of any fines, and the fine is only deterrent if it makes the offense so expensive as to be unprofitable, which is only loosely correlated with corporate income. I'd say, it's the maximum of: a percentage of corporate income, the cost to fix the damage, and the amount of profit the corporation derived from the fined behavior.

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Seems like every corporation should have a designated group of upper execs who assume responsibility for illegal corporate actions. I know they can sometimes be found guilty of knowingly making decisions that break the law, but the complexity of business makes placing blame on an individual extremely difficult. It should be a more straightforward liability they accept with the job. Some of these people make so ridiculously much money from their positions, they should bear a corresponding degree of responsibility.

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[–] blacktemplar@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago

Same argument holds for individuals, there are many violations that are capped there too (at least in my country)

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If corporations want to be treated like people, they should also go to jail and/or be executed for great enough crimes.

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[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Fines should be based on a percentage of the companies income.

20% of 30 billion dollars is gonna hurt a lot more than a 20 million dollar fine. especially if that 20 mil fine is based on an evil act that made the company 800mil.

and guess what? they can avoid the fines by stop being fucking vile ass evil piles of shit.

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[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've been screaming for decades now, that we need wealth caps. Why the fuck is it okay and acceptable that a single person can get full % of the entire world's wealth? Or whyneven do we allow billionaires? Or centillionaires. Nobody should be able to have a networth of over, say, 5 million dollars. You reach that limit, all your additional income goes to taxes, 100%. And, of course, if you're at, say, 4 million, the income tax should already be around 90% or so to avoid shenanigans with a rolling income / expenses scheme

When we no longer have billionaires, the game changes significantly. No longer will one single narcissist be able to accumulate power. Resources will have to be spread over the population as no single person can own a large company.

This will also limit the size of any company. A single person can have a million dollar home, a million in other things like cars, etc, and thenaybe have 2-3 millions tops to invest in companies. This means that a billion dollar company will need at least 500 relatively rich people to be share holders, and in reality it likely will be more like 5000... This will limit the size of companies, this will make smaller companies that are more focused on fewer products.

Putting this single limit in place, world wide, will change the world in an extreme way

It will also never happen until politicians will actually start listening to citizens and citizens will be educated enough to understand what they're voting for, and politicians be required to not lie... So yeah, good luck.

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