Republicans of course voted against any fines at all:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/fcc-fines-big-three-carriers-196m-for-selling-users-real-time-location-data/

Now with a 3-2 democratic majority on fcc a lot is getting done. One of Biden’s nominees was stonewalled by the senate for years (ISPs launched a huge smear campaign against her, even the daily mail of all things went after her). Biden had to relent and finally nominated someone else who got approved late 2023, finally breaking the 2-2 deadlock that Republicans were using to block everything like this including net neutrality.

Point taken. But I think bringing profits into it just makes things even more clear. Profit margins on film were as high as 80% for Kodak at times. I doubt any digital camera based company is making anything close to those kind of margins. Bringing people away from film cameras was definitely not in their best interest, but they did make digital cameras too, only beaten to the market by two years by Fuji Film (1991 vs 1989). They kind of even still do make digital cameras apparently? No idea how much involvement they have with them, but their branding is at least on them. Even if they had been more successful in digital cameras they would have needed a massive downsizing and shuttering of most of their chemical based jobs in Rochester, NY and other places. I think a transition to pharmaceuticals or other ways to leverage their core chemical manufacturing business would have made more sense, which they kind of tried too by purchasing at least one pharmaceutical company, but not very successful either. I think a lot went wrong at Kodak, but I don’t think leaning even more heavily into digital photography would have saved them, and pushing in that direction certainly wouldn’t have looked too appealing at the time given their massive monopoly and profits in film.

They did actually make lots of digital cameras and were a pioneer in their development. But they were always a film business, not a camera business. The camera was just the vehicle for recurring payments in the form of film, an early subscription model business basically. Selling a single digital camera without the years of film purchases after was way less profitable for them. Even with a full switch to digital their business would have needed to rapidly decrease in size and scale, shuttering most of their factories aimed at producing chemicals for film. There was no real way for Kodak to continue on in the massive form it once had no matter how the switch to digital happened. Even the remaining camera industry is still shrinking in size now compared to where it was with the advent of camera phones. Market cap of Kodak in the 90s was like 30 billion not even accounting for inflation and higher valuation of stock in the 30 years since, compare that to something like Nikon who has a current market cap of 3.71 billion. So yeah, the executives were right to avoid transitioning if the goal was to maximize profits for share holders, and they’re a corporation so that’s definitely their goal, right or wrong.