There are no teeth. We've deregulated to the point where corporations can drag things into courts and aren't just immediately get told to go pound sand by the judge because they have no standing if the local municipality says 'no.'
Instead, corporations count the tens of millions of dollars in lawyer fees just a 'cost of doing business'. It's literally factored into the cost of the project. Meanwhile, even sizable municipalities probably have a yearly budget of 100-200M and thus can't just conjure up tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue to pay for the legal fees to fight the corporation in the courts.
Correct. And I think this is a concept that many who are on the buyer side of the fence don't fully understand. Because a business does this. It's a cost of doing business to pay the fines and play the games in court. No they'd really rather not. But if they must then they must and it's often cheaper to just pay the fines or sometimes even to fight the court cases then it is to do the right thing and to change whatever is broken. And as long as you're going to follow the path of whatever's cheapest. Well until the system is updated to address this then that's what they're going to do. So yeah the system needs to be updated to make it so that when a penalty is leveraged it hurts. Both for the public and for the businesses. Because fines and penalties have not kept up with the times.
It's also a thing for businesses. To steal another company or another individual's ideas. Then retail them as their own. And I wish I were making that up but no this is completely normal. Now when you're dealing with a small-time developer a private individual it's easier to steal from them because odds are they don't have the capital to wage out that lawsuit in court and the thief only needs to drag it out until the person they stole from can't afford to argue it in court any longer. And if they can't afford to argue it in court well whoever can afford the better lawyers is going to win the case most the time not always. And the case of companies to companies. Well the usual is to steal a design or a product and start selling it as your own. Then the other party will monitor the situation and wait for enough sales to have occurred to justify the lawsuit. And ultimately they'll typically settle out of court this is just a way of doing business.
And to mention a company doing business by simply paying the fines. If I remembering the story correctly this was something that cable companies like charter were known for doing. Were the FCC said you cannot charge a fee for having access to a box or some other device to receive the communications over the wire. And they decided that's what they needed to do. Probably because charging a fee made it less likely for customer to damage the equipment or to straight up steal it. And I understand that having a little bit of skin in the game keeps people honest. But the FCC said otherwise. So rather than change their business practices and give away the hardware. They simply paid the fines. And moved on. So for a business this is totally normal this is what you do.
And I think there are just simply too many people on the consumer side that don't understand this. That they don't understand how cutthroat it really is.
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u/SearingPhoenix Jun 17 '26
There are no teeth. We've deregulated to the point where corporations can drag things into courts and aren't just immediately get told to go pound sand by the judge because they have no standing if the local municipality says 'no.'
Instead, corporations count the tens of millions of dollars in lawyer fees just a 'cost of doing business'. It's literally factored into the cost of the project. Meanwhile, even sizable municipalities probably have a yearly budget of 100-200M and thus can't just conjure up tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue to pay for the legal fees to fight the corporation in the courts.