Measuring the fine as % of revenue doesn't make much sense here. If they got $x in RDOF funding from the census block that they defaulted on, and they got fined $3x, that's a substantial penalty in relation to how much money they got in the first place. Getting a $100 parking ticket (for not paying for parking) isn't affect a bay area software engineer much (as measured by % of income), but it's still going to heavily disincentivize not paying for parking.
> Getting a $100 parking ticket (for not paying for parking) isn't affect a bay area software engineer much (as measured by % of income), but it's still going to heavily disincentivize not paying for parking.
It also depends on the risk of getting caught and how averse you are to breaking the law.
So it seems like the FCC has a $20.4B[1] fund across approximately 61,766 CBGs[2], or ~$330,279 per CBG. The fine was for 768 CBGs, which would then represent ~$253M of the fund, i.e., the fine was ~1.6% of the funded amount.
So I don't see how the fine makes any sort of sense.
[2]: see [1], see "Census Blocks, Associated Census Block Groups, and Reserve Prices (zip)", the larger of the two CSVs, the number of distinct values in the "cbg_id" column. There's a second CSV in the ZIP, and no documentation whatsoever, so I have no idea what that's about. You can include it in the calculation if you want, but it isn't going to materially affect the outcome here.
