'Digital Gangster' Facebook Intentionally and Knowingly Violated UK Privacy and Competition Rules, British Lawmakers Say (washingtonpost.com)

British lawmakers on Sunday accused Facebook of having "intentionally and knowingly violated both data privacy and anti-competition laws" in the country, and they called for investigations into the social media giant's business practices. From a report: The sharp rebuke came in a 108-page report written by members of Parliament, who in 2017 began a wide-ranging study of Facebook and the spread of malicious content online. They concluded that the United Kingdom should adopt new regulations so lawmakers can hold Facebook and its tech peers in Silicon Valley accountable for digital misdeeds. "Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like 'digital gangsters' in the online world," U.K. lawmakers said in their report, "considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law."

Comments

Summary/Article disagreement

[Brett Buck]

It says right up front that they "knowingly violated" laws, but in the actual content, they are talking about passing laws to hold them accountable. It's far from clear that this is not a case of someone wanting to declare something "illegal" trying to make it true, ex post facto.

        If there are already laws they are breaking, then you don't need new ones. Not to mention that this smacks of another EU-style shakedown, where people take the existing situation at Facebook, Google, etc, and then pass laws against it, then immediately demand them "pay their fair share" for breaking these laws (that we passes last week).

intention

[Tom]

Too few people understood already that all of this behaviour by the large corporations is fully intentional.

The law moves slowly, the markets move fast. That is why breaking the law is short-term profitable, and short-term profits are all that matters if you are measured by quarterly results. Your chances of either working somewhere else already or having made it so big that you basically don't care by the time the punishment rolls around are pretty good.

The whole system is rigged to make law-breaking profitable. And there's no easy fix.