This was my thought too. When the government really wants corporations to toe the line, suddenly there's no problem with "piercing the corporate veil" and other such equivocations. They know what works - threaten executives with prison. The solution exists and is applied already. For other things such as polluting the environment or misusing citizens private data... the truth is government doesn't really care.
> They know what works - threaten executives with prison.
The problem is that it works too well. As you can clearly see, the solution basically everyone individually applies is to stay clear of anything that might be an issue by several miles.
If you apply the same reasoning to things like private data handling, little things like just shipping stuff will be prohibitively expensive, as no one will want to handle private data like addresses and instead go to a provider, which will need excessive amounts of cash and red tape to do anything for taking on that liability. Building stuff will become impossible, as all of the current red tape will be exponentially expanded with liability checks against any possible pollution. Founding a company will basically never happen, because no one wants to risk 20+ years in jail - and if they do, they'll simply turn to crime, because if your risk profile is that off anyway, not paying taxes will just be a minuscule risk increase.
I'm not saying that there's no political incentive to ignore those issues and keep fines low, but piercing the corporate veil is the nuclear option and there is a reason it's used so little.
There's no proof that your catastrophic imaginary scenario would actually happen. Just "if you do what I don't want to it will be the end of the world". Convenient unprovable claim. Financial transactions happen all the time and are plenty cheap, they just don't do any with sanctioned entities.
You're claiming if data protection laws had actual teeth, google would close up shop and everyone would just go home and not do business anymore. That's laughable. Nobody would claim such BS in good faith.
> There's no proof that your catastrophic imaginary scenario would actually happen.
There is, just read TFA.
> Financial transactions happen all the time and are plenty cheap, they just don't do any with sanctioned entities.
And that's exactly the point. They are cheap because people are protected by the corporate veil (as long as they don't explicitly do something highly illegal). Anything where people are suddenly personally liable, they stay far away from. If we apply the same harsh punishments to all financial crime as we do for interacting with sanctioned countries, people will stay far away from interacting with that and those that don't will either demand truck loads of money or also be shady in other ways (most likely both).
> Nobody would claim such BS in good faith.
Someone reading my comment in good faith would have been able to see the point that I was making, which actually is pretty distinct from what you appear to be arguing against.
