As much as I hate the painful wait to see action on these fronts, I understand the desire to be careful and cautious before potentially irreparably destroying a business. But the penalties need to affect the decisionmakers personally. If Sundar Pichai was risking jail time to abuse Google's power, you'd better believe it wouldn't happen.
This isn't too far away from how it works for "proper" criminals like Roman Seleznev [0], so one can dream.
Presumably, this would involve the CEO travelling to Europe accidentally while a European arrest warrant was out on them (which would be negligent on someone's part). Since we have yet to see huge fines under the GDPR, let alone arrest warrants for not complying, this seems to be far off though.
I would be fine with the American government actually putting American CEOs in prison too. ;)
But even without the international extradition type problems, there are still a lot of problems, as we consider most of the wrongdoings these corporations are committing to be civil violations, and no matter how many people they harm, as long as they aren't treated as criminal, we can't put someone in jail for them.
I do feel this is a major problem though, as CEOs aren't realistically punished for corporate misdeeds that can cause massive, wide-ranging harm. Even if the CEO screws up badly enough to lose his job, he'll get a job being a CEO somewhere else.
Actually, if Winterkorn is found guilty, he could be thrown into jail for up to 25 years, and he would be personally financially liable to the tune of his entire fortune. So, yeah, he's not getting off easy like most executives do in the US. Let's see the US even try to do the same thing to bank executives. Oh wait, democrats declined to pursue any of them and were happy with a single low-level scapegoat.
