How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness.

IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side

> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

The purpose of a fine is not supposed to be a fee for a crime but a penalty that has deterrent effects. A flat fine is not an equal deterrent for people of different financial means.

In Finland the system is called "day fine", meaning it should match approximately a day of labor/income. In some situations you can even go to sit in prison for time proportional to the day fines, although this is nowadays rare.

Proportional to income is "the same" under the equivalence of time and money. A fine is some % of your income which is some % of your working time. The fine as a penalty should roughly be equivalent to time spent in prison, so that is some fixed amount of time which automatically translates to some lost amount of salary. Going to prison being an alternative to paying a fine when you aren't solvent.

Otherwise it isn't a penalty and is just the price of being permitted to do a thing which might be out of reach for the poor. That's just fundamentally unfair to permit the rich to do things we consider immoral if they are just able to afford it.

Non proportional fees just means there as a level of wealth where the law effectively no longer applies to you. Imagine if parking tickets cost you a penny, would you care where you parked? This is effectively the same thing.

> Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

Fairness in this case would mean giving equal fines for equal crimes.

But equality in which units? There's a case to be made that dollars are an implementation detail and that the political system cares about utility units.

If you want the fine to equally disadvantage all parties in utility units then the dollar values are going to be different. Because the idea is that each criminal should be equally unhappy with receiving the fine.

Being charged the same percentage of income is still the same punishment. It’s a non-controversial concept in economics that there is a marginal utility to money, as in, if you have a billion dollars, then getting an extra hundred doesn’t give you more utility. However a struggling family would be thrilled at a hundred bucks and maybe that means eating for the next several days. These people should not be charged with the same static dollar amount.

> Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

If you jail different people, they lose out on different amounts of income. Is that unfair?

Now remove the physical jail component and keep the rest of the punishment. Is that unfair?

There is one side of the political spectrum that feels that the penalty for a crime should be set irrespective of the perpetrator because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction pay the same absolute amount.

There is another side that feels the penalty should "hurt" the same amount because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction feel the same amount of pain (theoretically), roughly corresponding to paying the same relative amount.

IMO this falls apart when you accept the almost tautological fact that these laws are enforced selectively, so "fairness" goes out the window almost immediately. Enforcement is used as political pressure and as punishment. Under that view, the second option above feels much worse than the first.

> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same.

I think the reasoning as that when Google does it, it affects far more people than if (say) I sold a single phone with only my own apps pre-installed. Should I be fined $55 million?

Wow people actually think like this? Have you ever been poor? Genuinely wondering.

10% hurts the same no matter your income.

Fines are about punishment and deterrence. You cant deter a millionaire with a 100$ fine like you can a pensioner on a fixed 1000$ income.

Leaving a second comment to provide another perspective.

The more your wealth (and note that income is a crude approximation here), the easier your ability to pay. Hopefully you agree that a $50 parking fine means virtually nothing to a billionaire; it may as well not exist. Whereas to someone living at the poverty line, it is incredibly significant.

If you feel it's fair to penalize everyone the same absolute amount of money, that means you believe that rich people have effectively earned themselves a right(!) to violate laws that poor people can't afford to.

Or, putting it more bluntly, it means you think rich people are superior to poor people.

Is that fair?