Item — HN Reader

> Because no one believes these laws or bills or acts or whatever will be enforced.

Time will tell. Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment. Once these laws are enacted, they lay quietly until someone has a big enough bone to pick with someone else. There are already many traumatic events occurring downstream from slapdash AI development.

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That's even worse, because then it's not really a law, it's a license for political persecution of anyone disfavored by whoever happens to be in power.

Never mind the damage that was willfully allowed to happen that the bill was supposed to protect from happening.

Every law is like this. Only fools and schoolchildren believe that the rule of law means anything other than selective punishment of those who displease the ruling class.

I agree that is how it currently is in the US, but I don't believe it is universally true or that nothing can be done to change it if enough people resisted.

My statement has nothing to do with contemporary politics and is not unique in the slightest to the US. For an example you are likely sympathetic to, consider the experience of Pavel Durov since late 2024.

"Every law" seems like a huge exaggeration. Assuming for a moment we agree Pavel is a victim of selective prosecution, notice they're not charging him with a clear, straightforward crime like murder, they're charging him with things like[1] failing to prevent illicit activity on Telegram, and "provision of cryptology services [...] without a declaration of conformity". Those laws seem far more prone to abuse as a tool for selective prosecution than most others. (Some of the things he's charged with don't even sound to me like they should be illegal in the first place.)

[1]: https://x.com/fs0c131y/status/1828103712964817389

Every law in the sense of cumulatively, the ‘rule of law’ system has the same property of “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” that Beria’s system did.

Meta made $60B in Q4 2025. A one-time $1.4B fine, 20 years after enactment, is not "getting hammered".

They didn’t make $60B in Q4 2025 in Texas. 1.4B was 100% profit from Texas for years, that a big fine.

I see this as roughly equivalent to amortized big O complexity. If I push to a vector repeatedly, sometimes I will incur a significant cost O(n) of reallocation, but most of the time it's still O(1).

Similarly, if Meta violates the law, and is infrequently fined a small fraction of their revenue by a small number of governments, in general it will not be a big deal for them.

You also have to ask "how much is the specific thing in the lawsuit worth to Meta?"

I don't know how much automatically opting everyone in to automatic photo tagging made Meta, but I assume its "less than 100% of their revenue".

Barring the point of contention being integral to the business's revenue model or management of the company being infected with oppositional defiant disorder a lawsuit is just an opportunity for some middle manager + team to get praised for making a revenue-negative change that reduces the risk of future fines.

Work like that is a gold mind; several people will probably get promoted for it.

Big for Texas, not for Meta.

It’s under 5 hours of GDP for Texas. It’s a big fine, but not a huge deal for either party.

So what's the point? If neither party is really affected by a penalty (no diacernible benefit or loss to either), then is it all just performative?

Maybe I just answered my own question.

Things don’t need to be huge deals to influence behavior or be a net gain.

I bet you’ve taken a shortcut to save less than 1h for example.

I think time is different because it's finite. I admit I'll still opt for store brand to save a few bucks even making an engineering salary. But I'll also do something "illegal" (like parking at a metered spot without paying) to save time or otherwise do what I want and just deal with whatever financial cost incurred if I know it won't break me.

A saying I've heard is that if the punishment for a crime is financial, then it is only a deterrent for those who lack the means to pay. Small business gets caught doing bad stuff, a $30k fine could mean shutting down. Meta gets caught doing bad stuff, a billion dollar fine is almost a rounding error in their operational expenses.

That sounds like it will be in the courts for ages before Facebook wins on selective prosecution.

> Texas' sat on its biometric data act quite quietly then hammered meta with a $1.4B settlement 20 years after the bill's enactment.

Sounds like ignoring it worked fine for them then.