>> There is no reason to go into the comments of every post that shows a price of the fee a company paid in order to express why you think a company that is fined should be crippled because of it, the point is to deter people not to lay nuclear landmines for companies to be destroyed over.
> Shouldn't the same logic then apply to people? Yeah, figured as much.
Kinda sorta. There's not an exact equivalence. We don't punish every crime with the death penalty. Also, there are a lot more people than there are hard disk manufactures. "Nuking" a hard disk manufacture over a violation to deter others has a lot more downsides for the national community (let's make WD a monopoly as a deterrent?) than "nuking" a person for a violation.
The idea would be not to punish the corporation itself (a nebulous concept in any case), but to punish the decision makers that made the decision to pursue illegal profits. Fire the executives and the board, as they're the ultimate decision makers, and have the entire set replaced by a team with clearer judgement of the line between right and wrong.
This would accomplish the desired intent without perturbing the number of players in the market place.
If it's costly to the corporations, don't you think the owners would do such a thing? It's not an either or situation, but hitting them at the proper level of abstraction/let the internal "market" forces play it out.
You can't make it costly enough to the corporation without incurring undue collateral damage to a whole lot of people that had nothing to do with it. The point of is to focus the cost onto the actual decision makers responsible for the poor decision making; corporation would continue to survive, without collateral damage to employees and marketplace.
> Shouldn't the same logic then apply to people? Yeah, figured as much.
Kinda sorta. There's not an exact equivalence. We don't punish every crime with the death penalty. Also, there are a lot more people than there are hard disk manufactures. "Nuking" a hard disk manufacture over a violation to deter others has a lot more downsides for the national community (let's make WD a monopoly as a deterrent?) than "nuking" a person for a violation.