I just prefer personal accountability because it seems a fair and just way to organize things. These things don't happen as a force of nature: it's someone (or a bunch of people) making a decision, and then someone (or several people) implementing it.

If I scam someone in my brick and mortar store with fake products I will be held personally responsible as the owner, and rightfully so. And if other people knowingly participate in the scam they will be held responsible too. Never mind all the other stuff like lying reviews, dangerous products, etc.

So why aren't we holding Jeff Bezos and the rest of Amazon leadership's team similarly accountable? They're not innocent bystanders here.

Somehow there's this idea that personal accountability just doesn't apply except in cases of VERY blatant outright fraud (Enron, VW Diesel, Theranos), and even then it's haphazard and often weak (no one went to prison for e.g. Deepwater Horizon). IMO it's one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas. The bigger the company (and thus stakes, and negative effects) the lower the accountability is.

The Devil's Dictionary from 1906 already observed this with:

"CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."

But it'll likely conflict directly with personal freedoms.

Plus what's the logic behind the most draconian of implementations? - If we can hold Bezos to account, why not every AMAZON shareholder?

I don't think it's draconian at all, or conflicting with personal freedoms. How would it conflict?

Shareholders aren't making these decisions. But if shareholders voted for something they knew was illegal or could have known was illegal, then yes, maybe they should be held to account too.

> Shareholders aren't making these decisions

What are "these decisions"? I assumed you are talking about punishing people like Bezos for the activities of Amazon, even without proof he had direct knowledge/involvement of them, purely based on his position as a c-suite figurehead?

I don't care who has direct involvement or knowledge; you're accountable for what you operate and if you operate something with rampant scams then you're accountable for that.

They're operating a platform that enables criminal activity and they benefit from it. They've been told this (and even without it, they can and should have known). And then they elected to not do all that much about it. "Don't do anything" is just as much of a decision as "do something" is.

Last time I looked at this they were literally recommending scams with "Amazon's Choice"[1]. That one is now gone, but you just need to "sort by price" (a reasonable thing to do) to find tons of scams.[2] None of this is new information. This has been going on >10 years. There's tons of stories about this sort of thing.

"Yeah, there's tons of scams on our site, and yeah, we're making a profit off those scams, but what can we do?" just doesn't fly. Rampant illegal activity you're making a profit on but somehow no one is accountable? Screw that.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34588734

[2]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=2tb+usb+ssd&i=computers&s=price...

Once you reach a certain level of wealth, fines are no longer consequential. When you can restructure both your corporate and personal assets to span multiple countries with different regulations and poor cooperation, you've effective avoided them.

What about the 4% of the global turnover of a company as mentioned in https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/fines-penalties/?

If it were effective, we wouldn't all endure daily GDPR violations. But we do.

Non-enforcement is a different issue to fines being too low.

They're related, though. A portion of fines fund enforcement activity. (IMHO, a higher portion should go to enforcement. Right now way too much goes into general funds.)

> fines are no longer consequential

I don't see how this can possibly be true. Any corp has finite money, and operating costs; If the fines are high enough, they will be consequential.

> to span multiple countries

you can't really evade US fines/sanction and continue to operate in the west.

No government is going to fine Amazon or Google enough to break the company. It would displace thousands of workers, and have a serious impact on the local economy where those companies are based, if not the whole country. If the fine is large enough to have a material impact, it's the rank and file who are laid off as the company restructures, and the company then uses tricks like tax offsets to pull through from a loss of profit. This is before considering political ramifications, e.g. it's in the US' best interests to have the largest tech companies, and clipping their wings too much would cede ground to foreign competitors.

At the end of the day, the C-suite either know that the law is being broken, or they don't. One makes them responsible, and the other makes them criminally negligent. I absolutely believe that C-suite executives of VW, for example, should have been thrown in jail for diesel-gate. Not knowing the law is not an excuse for breaking it. Similarly, if you're presiding over a company, and your company is breaking the law, plausible deniability shouldn't be a defense. If you're getting paid to run the company, you are responsible.

because they will make you (the end user) pay the bill by increasing prices?

How do they make any user do anything? These aren't water utility companies, there is a limit to how they can be fined and still compete. I assume many things are already priced at the highest number the market will pay. How, for example, will FB/meta pass the cost to social-network end users?

Because at a certain point, fines punish lower level workers rather than management. Furthermore, if the company is large enough, fining it to the extent that it collapses has material effects on the economy, which governments are incentivized to avoid. This isn't to say that there shouldn't be financial consequences for breaking the law -- of course there should. But management should also be thrown in prison when the company breaks the law, because they're in a position of responsibility (it's what they get paid for). Either they knew -- in which case they're personally liable -- or they didn't, in which case they're criminally negligent, and again, personally liable.