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What sort of fine would you consider not to be a drop in the bucket?

This fine looks to be an estimated 1/8 of TikTok's profit in 2022.




An appropriate punishment would be: All children's accounts must be deleted and no new ones for minors allowed to exist for 2 years.

Any further infringement and the App is banned from the EU.


This would require all TikTok users to submit selfie + ID for verification and all those who don't would need to be assumed to be children and have their accounts deleted, right?


That's the end goal, so anonymity is basically destroyed on the internet, and people are condemned to digital dystopia and inescapable surveillance under the guise of "protecting the children".


That's how it already works for youtube. The EU mandated you need to prove to google that you are of age to watch certain videos.


How's that supposed to be enforced if the kids lie about their ages?


If you make $100k in a year in wages, and after all your expenses you net $16k in savings, 1/8 of that is $2k. Imagine violating some law that harms children and your fine is $2k.


>Imagine violating some law that harms children and your fine is $2k.

"Harms children". To make the analogy fair, imagine you're keeping a diary, and recording the observable information of every child that walks past your house. $2k seems like a reasonable fine.


I've seen people walk past news reporters with children. They even asked them questions about Santa Claus. Then they sold advertising to display before and after that event. Then they showed it to the public. What fine should we impose? 10%


Taking pictures of every child that walks past your house and selling access to those pictures online? $2k still seems fair to you?


In your opinion is it too high, lower or someone not understanding what it means to be in public?


Future CEO material right here.


25% of Annual Revenue and firing of all CxOs (CEO, COO, CTO etc)


They'll just write bigger golden parachutes into their contacts to offset the risk. That or suddenly everyone is an EVP and the C levels all are just paid fall guys.

But 25% revenue might work.


Well add a 3 strikes law [0], after all corporations are supposed to be person, from a legal standpoint.

3 strikes, and the company is dissolved. In fact, this should definitely happen for US credit rating companies which keep on leaking data.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law


This is an EXCELLENT proposal. They would fight just as hard to ensure they never receive the second strike to avoid the forever-doom that will loom over investors.


I think a 3 strike against the CxO as a person will be more effective.

1st strike blocks you from working as CxO for 5 years, 2nd strike for 10 years, 3rd strike is forever.

Right now too many bad CxO jump from one ship to the next again and again.


When a CxO gets their 2nd or 3rd company broken up they'll find it very hard to find a ship willing to let them on board.

If you let the company get away with crimes over and over and only punish a CxO the company will simply hire a guy to take the fall for them. There's an endless number of people working minimum wage who would happily take a CxO title and salary for years knowing full well that there's a chance they might get fired eventually.


#1: If a guy breakes the rules so much he gets a 3rd strike, I think it is perfectly reasonable he should never have a CxO job again. It is too easy getting away with serial white-collar crimes.

#2: It is not the company to decide who to take the fall. It is the court/judge.


Then you retitle yourself to EVP during the timeout.


3 strike laws usually only apply to violent felonies. You don't go to jail for life after getting 3 speeding tickets.

I'd be down with this, but we need to decide which kinds of violations are speeding tickets and which are serious felonies.


Assigning blame to the CxOs can be tricky. In this case the actual violations were from 2020, well before the EU even began its investigation, and some of the C-suite staff has changed.

Should it be the current C-suite that’s fired or the ones in charge when the violation occurred? Or maybe the ones in charge when the original policy at TikTok was created? Or what if the current C-suite was in charge, briefly, for the violating period but they’re also they ones that changed things to be in compliance before the investigation began, should they still be fired?

The diffuse responsibility makes this stuff tricky to implement.


Make such larges fines you end up with even fewer companies and the European Union gets even poorer, people keep wondering why their standards of living keep getting worse and GDP hasn't increased in over a decade. There's a reason European companies have such low tech salaries; even places like Singapore, Shanghai and the gulf countries have higher average tech salaries now than e.g. France or Germany.


Let's be real, the actual money paid out will be much less, and over a long period of time most likely. The number needs to be big enough to make other companies do everything they can to not let this kind of stuff happen. In current state these kinds of fine are probably just line items to account for if these companies get caught.

How about 100% of TikTok's profit in 2022, and go from there.


10 years of gross revenue, 4 years in jail for the CEO and any other liable individuals.


10 years of gross revenue is an actual death penalty for a company.

Why go that route instead of claiming its assets in the jurisdiction and revoking its right to operate?


That would work too !




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