New Mexico jury finds Facebook liable for over 43 million violations of consumer protection law—and Meta could owe over $200 billion in penalties

Stop just fining these fuckers! They can afford any amount you fine them with. Shut down the service and charge them with crimes or gtfo.

Normally I’d agree, but if one of the more populated states fined meta at this rate it’d be a corporate death penalty

For context - New Mexico has a population of 2,124,222, making it the 36th most populated state in the country.

That’s under 1% of the country. California has 39,355,309… No company currently in existence could survive a 4 trillion dollar fine

This is huge… if it goes through

If 43 million violations of the law aren’t enough to shut something down, what is?

Fuck if I know. We can revoke a corporate charter through an act of Congress for any or no reason, we have trust busting laws that allow courts to split a company, individual states can decide to restrict or kick out a company…

We have mechanisms to do these things, but we don’t really have a system of corporate criminal punishment. It’s one of those problems of using an early version of democracy… Courts can fine and impose sanctions, they can prosecute individuals for their part, but as time went on instead of legislating a system of corporate punishment it’s just been left to case law

Which doesn’t work out well, because corporations have grown to the point they can dump more way money into legal defense than the courts can put into prosecution

So the answer to your question is basically that it doesn’t matter how much they violate the law, they’re to big and too powerful for the courts to handle them with the tools available