Some country recently fined Apple every day until they resolved the issue. I think such solution would both help push Apple to actually resolve the issue and do so in a timely manner.
As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.
$1m/day since they launched the iPhone App Store in 2008 is roughly 2 months worth of 30% App Store commision revenue. I.e. they'd be making more money by keeping such a small fine on the balance sheet than complying.
The same thing at $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.
That is exactly what the judge has triggered. She has referred Alex Roman and anyone else complicit in Apple for review of contempt of course. This carries actual prison time.
Freeze their ability to do anything period. Physically lock the incorporation documents in a prison cell. They won't need to do "basic life support", the documents will be provided with trays of food, water, and adequate opportunities for exercise by the prison facility. If they need more than that, they can petition their former customers to send money to their prison commissary account for the purchase of snacks, toiletries and such.
A fictitious person's executives and directors are typically real. Or, if fictitious as well, go down the rabbit hole of said contractors until you finally find the real ones.
In the country I'm from, each exec gets a partial sentence in accordance with their contribution to the criminal act. And no, the total amount on years in prison needn't match the total, there's a minimum and also percentages always exceed 100%.
Limited liability doesn't and shouldn't protect criminals from imprisonment.
Careful. The real humans at the bottom of that rabbit hole are the individual shareholders. That is the real root of this problem -- the people that ultimately profit from this behavior (a group that, ironically, almost certainly includes the judge in this case, and most of the people in this thread) have no responsibility whatsoever.
Because they're not responsible? We (shareholders) pay executives to manage the companies. This means doing what is best for the company, not committing crimes.
Is your comment asserting that there are no people poor enough to steal food? Or are you claiming that poor people do not get arrested and are in fact treated with kindness and compassion by the various police agencies?
The court is pushing for criminal censure of some of the involved participants. If that happens -- and it absolutely should -- it will have a tremendous impact on the hubris seen in Apple, and in the industry in general. Hopefully bribes don't get them out of this, and some Apple execs really do end up with prison sentences.
Apple makes tens of billions of dollars a year off App Store royalties. If this ruling is upheld this fine has a net present value of 100 billion - trillion dollars depending on your discount rate. They will lose billions of dollars a year forever.
Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.