Huge Government Fines are Just the Cost of Business
It’s cheaper to get caught than to do things legally in the first place.
Amazon has been accused of more corporate chicanery, this time for using shady practices to enroll people in Prime and making it difficult to cancel it. This is on the back of recent court decisions to the tune of $31 million for two separate privacy violations.
The thing is, a $31 million fine is a rounding error compared to the $127.4 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2023. Their net income was $3.2 billion that quarter, which puts three months of their profits at literal orders of magnitude higher than that fine.
This is typical these days — it feels like we can’t go more than a week or two without hearing about some big company or another getting fined millions of dollars for horrible and illegal practices. Whether they’re engaging in monopolistic or monopsonist practices, cheating customers, or just committing various other crimes, huge corporations seem to lie, cheat, and steal constantly.
They get caught a lot, of course — there is only so much that one can get away with in a world where the internet exists and anyone can email anything to anyone else. As such, whistleblowers abound and a lot of big corporations are made to pay fines to the…
