Proving guilt is difficult. Execs can and do go to jail when it can be proved they personally did something illegal.

Guilt by association is not acceptable in a first world country. You don't go to jail if your brother commits a crime, you shouldn't go to jail if your company commits a crime. You only go to jail if you commit a crime.

> Guilt by association is not acceptable in a first world country. You don't go to jail if your brother commits a crime

Staw man. The only way that is comparable is if you oversaw your brothers career and received part of his income... if he then committed a crime (from which you benefited), then yes, you could be held part accountable.

Execs are not merely "associated", they are responsible and receive excessive compensation directly derived from the actions of the organisation they oversee. If a corporate crime is committed on their watch they could be held accountable, if not through direct involvement, through negligence - allowing it to take place by not exerting enough oversight or management... to say otherwise would be similar to allowing people to drive cars negligently killing people without consequence, the analogy is not exact, since the car (the organisation) is not purely mechanical and has some degree of autonomy which is where these matters are not cut and dry, and those would be the finer points of a case exploring whether an individual subverted reasonable oversight or not - in the inexact analogy you could say, whether one of the wheels decided to ignore instructions, or whether the driver (exec) wasn't event bothering to steer.

Too difficult: you need to prove they knew and took a series of actions to get there, but it's very hard to do, and they usually have fall guys all the way to protect themselves. It's also easier than ever to destroy evidence.

The cost of going after those companies is ridiculous already, once they are proven guilty, it would be simpler if we could punish the company as a person, than to find a real person to punish. After all, companies are very happy to be persons for other legal purposes.

> Too difficult: you need to prove they knew and took a series of actions to get there, but it's very hard to do, and they usually have fall guys all the way to protect themselves. It's also easier than ever to destroy evidence.

Make it illegal not to have a "custody trace" of how a decision came to be. Even if the CEO came up with it in the shower, for the thing to be implemented, it has to come across a lot of individuals. Make them having to keep all of that data around, and required to disclose how something came to be in case it's revealed as unlawful.

Yeah, that surely wouldn't grind everything to a halt and effectively make the existence of non-megacorporations impossible.

No, what should instead be done is prevent the existence of these megacorporations which have disproportionate influence on humanity in the first place. Prevent them to form and chop up the existing ones aggressively into smaller ones.

I've long suspected that these "megacorporations" are nurtured for national security reasons, to consolidate and project power. The disproportionate influence is by design, a feature not a flaw. Especially since those who make the rules are owned by such powers themselves, including those responsible for intelligence (corporate spying, undermining workers unions) and regulation (not preventing Metalphabetamazons from dominating a wide range of industries).

This has at times been explicit policy. It's a big part of how Japan (re-)joined the developed world so fast after WWII—they gave a few megacorporations a captive home market to keep them healthy & safe, used incentives to get them to pool R&D money and share the output, then set them loose on foreign markets.

Maybe but when you are CEO, the fact of "not knowing" should not protect you from consequences. If not jail, at least being banned from being a corporate officer in any capacity and relinquish your stocks/benefits/whatever so at least you remove the profit motive of fraud.

Yup. And if you put Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg in jail for a year or two, watch the tech industry whip itself into shape in weeks. Hold people actually responsible for the damage they do and you'll see real change.

I doubt that giving the power to overseas nations to criminalise and incarcerate US citizens has no downsides.

Believe it or not, committing a crime in a foreign country as a US citizen will result in you being incarcerated in said country regardless of your citizenship status.

Most crimes committed by US citizens in foreign countries are in the context of their military service: War crimes. And instead of being incarcerated for those, they just complete their tour of duty and go home. With any luck there's some public outcry about their crimes, but often not even that. The US is also not party to the Rome statute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute), and has even threatened to personally target International Criminal Court employees if they try to prosecute US citizens.

... but I suppose you're right about more mundane, non-government-sanctioned crimes.

I do believe it. But that's not relevant, because OP is talking about an additional power.

In that case the argument should be about whether or not it should be a criminal offense at all (meaning whether European CEOs should be jailed in the case of malicious actions against their users). The fact it would theoretically extend to people in the US (good luck extraditing them) is IMHO not really an important thing to consider.

Well, that was the example this thread was talking about. You could change the topic and make what we were talking about unimportant, but that seems a bit churlish to phrase it that way : - )

You are already eligible for punishment for crimes committed in foreign countries. I don't see how this makes things any different.

Some crimes, yes. If it doesn't make things different, then there's nothing to change. If it does change things, then that's because the US would be allowing it for non-crimes.

Both individuals have committed crimes (perjury, for starters) here in the United States as well. We can jail them here!

They can certainly be jailed for crimes, yes.

I understand what you mean, but keep in mind that many nations do have extradition treaties with one another.