1.) Pay a disgruntled competitor's employee to deliberately sabotage part of their product in an illegal way.
2.) Finger the company to the feds.
3.) Watch as the competitor's market position is hurt by bad thing X.
Works if X is fines, sanctions, stricter regulations, prison time for those involved, or even just a court case that costs a significant amount of money.
Thus we shouldn't punish a corporation no matter how bad it is.
As a side note, this same logic would let us conclude that punishing a person who commits a crime is a bad plan because it allows for their enemy/rival to frame them.
I agree your arguments are reductio ad absurdum. The difference between the government compelling groups to forced speech (release all of your source-code, trade secrets) and fines is that forced speech destroys value. From a societal standpoint, the punishment should scale to the crime. Being forced to open source a companies code is arbitrary and indiscriminate. Why should a company who spent $20 million on their code, who committed a transgression that would be equivalent to a fine of $100k have to open source their entire code base?
My guess is the motivation to force a company to disclose their source code as punishment is coming from a place of thinking that the more harsh the punishment, the more seriously actors will abide by the rules. As it's been proven to be the case in criminal law, the death penalty does nothing to dissuade homicide.
1.) Pay a disgruntled competitor's employee to deliberately sabotage part of their product in an illegal way.
2.) Finger the company to the feds.
3.) Watch as the competitor's market position is hurt by bad thing X.
Works if X is fines, sanctions, stricter regulations, prison time for those involved, or even just a court case that costs a significant amount of money.
Thus we shouldn't punish a corporation no matter how bad it is.
As a side note, this same logic would let us conclude that punishing a person who commits a crime is a bad plan because it allows for their enemy/rival to frame them.
Reductio ad absurdum.