Uber and Lyft with regard to taxi and contractor/employee laws, Google in regards to privacy, Meta in regards to basically everything...

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gruez a day ago | parent [-]

You haven't identified a specific case in any of the examples so I asked an LLM to do it for you, and came up with two:

1. O'Connor v. Uber Technologies, Inc (2013): So far as I can tell, they settled for $20M, but the settlement allowed uber to continue classifying drivers as contractors. You might be able to spin this as how uber is above the law or whatever, but the alternate take is that the drivers had a weak case, and were settling for whatever they could get. Not the best case to argue that companies are fined too little.

2. New York AG vs Uber: it seems like the settlement was two parts: a cash payout for past drivers and additional benefits to drivers going forward. Digging deeper into the settlement, it looks like for the former like uber's crime was improperly deducting sales taxes and black car fees[1], rather than failing to pay benefits. It doesn't look like uber got fined at all for not providing benefits. Again, you can frame this as uber being so above the law that they got fined $0 (!), but the argument from above applies. Maybe the NY AG had a weak case. Clearly they're willing to fine uber for something as vague as improper sales tax deductions, so why didn't they go for damages for uber not paying benefits?

[1] https://ubernyagsettlement.com/Portals/0/Document%20Files/NY...

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solardev a day ago | parent [-]

I think this is only proving the parent's point, that the legal system is completely unable to deal with the megacorps. Shrug. I don't read those results the same way you do.

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gruez a day ago | parent [-]

...or megacorps have functional legal departments to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff. Of the cases they actually get sued for, there's enough complexity and genuine question of law that they can't straightforwardly prosecuted. There's a reason why basically all states had to pass bills to reclassify gig work companies, rather than winning slam dunk cases with years of back pay.

In cases companies megacorps are clearly breaking laws, they're appropriately fined. eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767461

Maybe all of this basically cashes out to "the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change" to you, but to me this looks like a functioning legal system where defendants actually have a fair chance of winning.

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mextrezza 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> In cases companies megacorps are clearly breaking laws, they're appropriately fined.

Not always! lawyers representing classes in class actions don't always negotiate as hard as they could or should during settlements. You're probably familiar with federal judge Lucy Koh's prominent cases.

Not really understanding your argument that everything is fine, and there's nothing to see here.

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LunaSea 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> or megacorps have functional legal departments to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff.

Is that why Apple, Google and Meta ship a billion dollars every few years to the EU Cour of Justice?

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justinclift 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff

That's not what the legal departments seem to be used for though.

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gruez 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Again, you don't see the illegal behavior that they didn't try. For instance, Uber probably could have nabbed more market share by allowing drivers to pick people up off the streets as well, but that would obviously break taxi medallion laws. Uber worked within the pre-booked ride service loophole. Same goes for contractor classification. They probably could have gotten better customer satisfaction ratings if they prohibited drivers from using multiple apps, but that would obviously look bad for them if they wanted to argue drivers were contractors.

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justinclift 19 hours ago | parent [-]

> Again, you don't see the illegal behavior that they didn't try.

We don't know if that was due to legal departments or other factors, so claiming it was due to legal departments seems more like hope/wishing/assuming rather than actual knowledge. :(

	▲	mextrezza 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		if the legal department does it, it's not illegal.