“This is illegal!”
Bung in the post
“This is legal… for a fee!”
If the punishment is a fine, it is targeted at those who can’t afford the brib—I mean fee.
So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you’re free to go.
More like seventy five cents, given Google’s profit margins.
More like saying to the judge “What’s the max you can charge me? Alright, here’s the money, let’s skip the court bullshit.” in this case.
Mm… no. It’s really not.
The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.
So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.
Except it’s not a bribe. It’s entirely above-board, the money they’re paying is a fine. They’re not “getting out of a ticket”, they’re paying the ticket.
Except they also don’t get points on their license, or whatever is analogous here.
It’s more like paying the ticket without ever showing up in court. And at least where I live, I can do that.
No - it’s actually not like that at all.
Google didn’t pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.
The prosecution’s own expert estimated that the amount that was paid was the maximum they could expect to get.
Corporate equivalent to a speeding ticket
Sounds a bit unusual, but not unfair - Google just preemptively paid all of the damages that the government was seeking in this particular case, which is the only thing the jury would have been needed to determine. So having a jury would be a complete waste of the jury’s time. The rest of the case would be up to the judge anyway.
If the prosecutor thinks they could get more now maybe they should have asked for more earlier. I think this may have been a miscalculation on the prosecution’s side.