The law should penalize, by corporate dissolution, companies who use their software to cheat consumers if it wants to end the behavior
Cheating is a given. — Inspectors certify that gas-station pumps are pumping unadulterated fuel and accurately reporting the count …
Context & Ripple Effects
This Locus op-ed makes an accountability argument: fines and settlements don't stop software that cheats consumers, so the penalty should be existential — dissolve the company. It lands in a corpus where software's role as both enforcer and transgressor keeps resurfacing.
Two threads give the argument legs. On one side, [[a:979334|proctoring software like Honorlock has been criticized for flagging normal student behavior during exams]] — software policing humans while its own errors carry no comparable sanction. On the other, the earlier case that defendants should be able to inspect the software code used against them frames the same question from the transparency side: who checks the checker?
First-order effects
- Under a dissolution regime, vendors whose software misfires against consumers — the proctoring firms allegedly punishing normal behavior among them — would face loss of the corporation itself, not just refunds, fines, or the reputational damage they absorb today.
Second-order effects
- Companies would have strong incentive to open their code to independent audit, extending the logic of the right-to-inspect argument from criminal defendants to any consumer-facing system whose output can wrongly penalize people.
Third-order effects
- If corporate continuity became the collateral for software accuracy, boards would treat algorithmic error rates as a governance risk on par with financial fraud — while the cheat economy itself keeps professionalizing on both sides, from Cluely raising seed money to market 'cheating on everything' to Riot Games' anti-cheat head describing how it discredits cheat developers.
The trend: Software that judges consumers is being pushed from reputational criticism toward formal legal accountability, with code transparency and corporate liability as the emerging levers.