"An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that the fake comments used the identities of millions of consumers, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge or consent."
$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
> $615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
It is. But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute. [0]
> But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute.
Prosecuting that would have lead to a dangerous precedent for a lot of companies and government agencies involved in propaganda.
Not prosecuting it is a dangerous precedent. Especially now we have AI text generation, such actions should lead any company to be sued into bankruptcy, and jail time for its leaders.
> Prosecuting that would have lead to a dangerous precedent for a lot of companies and government agencies involved in propaganda.
Propaganda (a.k.a , advertising/marketing) is broadly legal (though some specific methods and certain actors participating in certain kinds are restricted), deliberately making materially false statements to the government in the course of, and in order to influence, a government proceeding is prohibited. Firmly drawing the line between those things is a good thing.
Not really. Vast majority of the crypto money made in 2021-2022 was by swarming ICOs and launchpads with sometimes hundreds of thousands (among people i personally know) and probably millions among those i don't, fake accounts - all having real names, addresses, IPs, passport scans etc. - getting in onto highly deficit launches when like 1 in a 100 trying gets in, and then the coin goes 10x because of immense demand. You do it with 100K accs, 1000 get in and buy coin for $500 each, you get $4m profit spending $500K for buy-ins and another $500K for accounts themselves ($5 apiece). Until even that stopped working because apparently, these fraudsters simply ran out of people worldwide. Some rather ordinary people made north of $100M this way, and i'm sure there are those i don't know (i'm not really in crypto at all, just like hanging out with smart guys) tho made billions. No one went to jail as far as i heard.
Many went to jail and some celebrities got fines. I'm pretty sure some went under the radar but the prosecution is still working on the years 2016-2019. If you are in the US and you've been involved in such sh*t, you are in really bad position.
It seems the thing to do, before you dump toxic chemicals into the water or whatever, is to open a corporation. "Mistakes were made", after all.
This is only trumped by by sovereign immunity, for starting wars or oil spills or releasing viruses or whatever. "Bush is gone, let's move on - why are you still on that?"
I will not silently go to prison because my 401k worth under USD 20k owns 0.0015 shares as a part of some mutual fund.
The CEO and the board do not do my bidding.
Send them to prison.
Technically you own shares of a mutual fund, and the mutual fund owns the stock. Unless the mutual fund only owns its shares via ownership share in a bank, which owns a derivative which owns the 0.0015 shares.
Which is generally why responsibility stops with the board of directors, because there’s no way there was criminal intent through four layers of indirection. (Except shell companies, of course.)
That sounds like it would be a very strong incentive for investors to avoid potentially bad actors and instead favor non-criminal investments such as bonds. This is a feature.
So you do a convertible bond with a buy option that give you 90% of the company if it's successful and you still avoid risks and get all of the profit.
We deliberately changed this with the advent of the LLC, which is a new thing (~50 years)
Before that shareholders were liable for corporate acts. At least monetarily
LLC's are state inventions, and thus vary quite a bit, but one standard feature is that you can't be liable for more than you put in. Thus they are shielded from any excess liability beyond their investment. This is true of c-corps today for sure.
However, on top of that, they usually have almost no formalities or regulations, making piercing the corporate veil incredibly difficult.
C-corps have limited liability (now), but piercing is much easier for bad acts, and they have lots of regulation and formality (historically) that helped prevent bad acts in the first place.
The LLC changed a lot here - you could form businesses basically structured any way you want, with almost no regulations, and still not be liable. Outside of constructing an LLC to do totally illegal things (like rob banks or something), you and your shareholders are pretty much never liable.
That is definitely not true of C-corps, and was even less true historically :)
For limited liability in general:
General forms of limited liability are about 100-150 years old, depending on country.
IE before 1850, it was pretty rare. I believe new york has an earlier statute, but it was uncommon.
LLC's are not corporations, either, under most state law, they are special forms of companies.
The alternative mind you, was sometimes double liability for shareholders, who both lost their investments, and had to pay for excess loss.
I'm actually okay with that - it's a good way to ensure better diligence and less risk.
It's true that LLC's enabled innovation that would have been slower, but at a tremendous cost - enabling almost any risk to be taken for free is to me, a lot worse than slower innovation. It also lead to totally perverse things (toxic dumping, etc) and shareholders didn't worry or care because at most they lost some of their investment, and most of the time, could easily pull it out before the shares dropped, and move on to investing in the next horrible thing. In the old world, they would have been responsible for the entire cost, even if they pulled out.
Limited liability is a bad idea as long as people can do horrible things to each other and the world faster than you can (or should) make them strictly illegal.
People can always think of horribly destructive ways to make money, and ensuring not just personal, but shareholder liability for them, is one of the only ways to keep things in check.
These things would happen a lot less if the ROI was not as high, and in particular, if downside risk was not minimal.
Your friendly billionaire is going to invest a lot less in arms dealers if the downside risk is not just their 1 million investment, but their entire fortune.
I would be completely open to prosecuting a majority stake holder who insisted they were not responsible for a companies' abhorent actions because we have no evidence that all their personal requests passed the board.
I would be perfectly fine with prosecuting every single employee as well. The level of “I didn’t see the contents of documents I printed” is far too high everywhere, and if employees were unwilling to carry illegal activity, it would be much harder to perform this level of crime.
It’s exactly similar to everyone who participated in a pyramid scheme is liable for the last round of victims. Up to you to get informed.
In the game of prisoners dilemma, they defected and won. This means their strategy of corruption is a winning strategy. It means our law has failed and we can expect more people to practice a strategy of corruption and flouting the law rather than a strategy of adherence to the law or ethical principles.
Breaking the rules and cheating has been a celebrated strategy here and in the startup community. Remember that Uber and AirBnB were blatantly illegal when they launched and made millions. Remember how YC was encouraging people who advertised how to lie to skip covid vaccine wait lines as a "social hack"?
I mean, the rhetoric for net neutrality was pretty extreme. According to the rhetoric of the time, we would be living in a world of internet "fast lanes" right now if net neutrality didn't pass. Only services affiliated with the big greedy telcos were going to be given a pass while all the other services on the web were going to require additional fees to get adequate bandwidth to/from. That was a major fear mongering argument that hasn't come to pass. All the major tech sites were publishing the same rhetoric.
> According to the rhetoric of the time, we would be living in a world of internet "fast lanes" right now if net neutrality didn't pass.
Anything remotely resembling this existed almost a decade ago in a very different landscape, and what you're saying isn't even really reflective of the reality at the time. The vast majority of reasonable people were talking about what would gradually happen if the concept of net neutrality was totally thrown out; in the interim both sides have constructed more nuance, there is more public awareness, more partisanship, and thus different goalposts being fought over.
Now we have a ruling that the FCC can't limit state net neutrality law, because Verizon was literally fucking THROTTLING FIREFIGHTERS DURING A MAJOR WILDFIRE. Less "fast lane," more "death lane." ISPs know that the current environment won't tolerate their unchecked fantasies.
They have a new fantasy where they want a fee from high bandwidth platforms like Netflix and YouTube, because suppisedly they can't deliver what they already charged consumers for. More likely because there's a lot of money moving about and they want a bigger slice.
At the time home broadband wasn't so cheap outside of about a few hundred major cities, satellite internet was a joke, and phones were still on 3G networks with relatively aggressive data caps.
It wasn't obvious whether the telcos were going to keep competing and improving or just become complacent as a cartel. Snowden's leaks were just about to be released. The distrust seemed very reasonable at the time.
In a few ways the "fast lane" idea did get implemented, but in terms of cost rather than the speed of access. Lots of bundles between telcos and streaming services exist now (i.e. Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, ESPN, YouTube TV, etc.).
What did these companies get out of pushing to repeal it then? If the regulation was banning a business model that no one was going to use anyway, I don't see the impetus to commit mass fraud. Does net neutrality prevent anything beyond fast lanes and censorship?
- perhaps it includes auditing and reporting measures to ensure they aren't doing this things.
- maybe its really hard to guarantee exactly equal performance for all traffic and they examine the traffic and do different things depending on the domain to balance loads
To overly simplify it I believe we witnessed a battle of big tech vs big ISP. Each had a financial stake. Big ISP didn't want to pay for investments in infrastructure it didn't think would bring a good ROI or the extra costs you mentioned above with having to comply with new government regulations. And Big tech didn't want to pay extra fees for being some of the biggest servers of data on the internet. The fact so many comments here don't acknowledge big tech also had business interests in net neutrality passing like big ISP had business interests in it failing scares me. They are both big business looking out for their own backsides. I'm saying this as someone who grew up in a house that STILL doesn't have access to highspeed landline internet in 2023 because the ISPs did t consider the density of houses in the area worth the investment. I'm not immune to Big ISP or a shill. But this legislation was not the good vs evil it's made out to be by so many. Big tech companies have little problem taking a stand for some opinions they don't seem acceptable. they don't give neutrality to their platforms either.
Big tech has large service costs because a large number of little people are requesting data from their networks. Data for which the transit has already been payed for by the requestor. Despite the 'asymmetries' in throughput vectors, the market value equivalent of a Poynting vector is minimized with settlement-free peering. Paid peering is only enforceable because there are few enough retail providers for large segments of the population that they can wield monopsony power without customers fleeing on masse from degraded service.
I remember back then, it was abundantly clear that this is what it was. Ajit Pai was against it. He’s a corporate shill. They were doing stuff deliberately to sour the process. Also, like 100% of the fake comments were against net neutrality, which was quite telling. The fake comments weren’t even spread in a believable way. The times look very much bot generated. Simple stuff to filter out if you were honest.
Are you really positing that the NY State AG was colluding across four years of time with the Trump administration's FCC? That's getting a big beyond "jaded" and into tinfoil territory, to be honest.
No, there's no collusion here. These are just state laws that are insufficient to compel the behavior we want. She got what she could and called it a victory. But a very progressive AG is clearly not in the pocket of the internet content industry.
"but it says right here in article 5 paragraph 20 section b of the EULA you agreed to that we may use your personally identifiable information to improve our service."
Such a disheartening outcome. They perpetuated fraud at a scale we've never seen, they get away with it, they changed history, and now we have to live with it.
Right. They need to reopen commentary and unrepeal net neutrality. How is it that we have a system that rewards endless appeals in the judiciary but the equivalent of a mistrial in public policy is treated with a barely-there fine?
Interestingly the actual judgement is significantly higher (still single digit millions). I dont really know what a "Statement of Financial Condition" is but I assume it means they are taking basically all the money these companies + their directors have.
These are not big operations, they were charging 7c a "lead", so each company made ~100k, and the CEO was running the script to send fake data himself.
Yeah I mean without looking into specifics of what criminal laws would or wouldn’t be applicable, that definitely seems like something the CEO should do a bit of prison time for.
Authoritarianism will reliably produce such outcomes regardless of the economic system or ideology at play, and violent revolution/vanguardism will reliably produce authoritarianism.
Vanguardism and violent revolution are a failure, that doesn't make capitalism the only alternative. Indeed, that's entirely orthogonal.
Plenty of capitalist states have committed similar atrocities. An obvious example being the early United States - the transatlantic slave trade and the various death marches inflicted on Native Americans are every bit as horrifying as the crimes of the USSR, and were committed explicitly to obtain labor and real estate (notice these are both forms of capital) for our burgeoning capitalist economic system. Yet the people who claim the USSR proves communism is necessarily violent don't seem to take this as evidence that democracy or capitalism are similarly irredeemable.
You are describing totalitarian authoritarianism, not communism.
This is why I felt that the distinction between communism and the failed USSR experiment was necessary. Sadly, whenever many people from the US hear the word communism, they immediately assume it means the Soviet Union. Communism was one of many aspects of USSR, many of which were much less desirable by its people.
Could you provide one example of communism that did not end up an authoritarian regime?
Communism is just not compatible with freedom. When free to choose, societies do not become communist, they embrace production and trade. You cannot achieve what communists want without extensive use of force
It has not been implemented on a state level without the state also being totalitarian. There have been few tries to do it on a state level, anyways.
However, on a town or district level:
1. Primitive Communism — basically all human history before the agricultural revolution.
2. The Paris Commune — Paris was run by its workers for a few months before bloody suppression by capitalists.
3. The Israeli Kibbutz movement.
4. The Zapatistas in Mexico.
5. The Rojava region in Syria.
Overall, there are many cases in which communism has been successful and sustainable for a long time at a district scale. In case of primitive communism, for thousands of years.
If you aren’t able to distinguish communism and revolutionary authoritarianism you have very little right to enter these sorts of arguments with any sort of authority. Take your US propaganda view of political and economic systems and run off elsewhere.
$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.