I wonder if we could kill the secrecy by just doing this upfront?
"Sure, you can have your acquisition. Here's a price sheet for the changes you've requested."
Less hide and seek or regulatory expense, you can assess much larger penalties for dishonesty than for up-front admissions, and you can point the fees to something pro-social and help mollify people about Facebook's low tax rate.
We could, but that just turns into a tax on doing the things that society has deemed bad through the government. That's what the current situation is effectively, so what you're suggesting might be an improvement. I would prefer that we make the fines actually painful enough to work as a deterrent however. A percentage based fine is the only way to do so that I can think of since corporations are doing larger and larger deals all the time. If the fine for something like this was say 50% of the purchase price, that should at least cause some hesitation on the corporation's part.
"Sure, you can have your acquisition. Here's a price sheet for the changes you've requested."
Less hide and seek or regulatory expense, you can assess much larger penalties for dishonesty than for up-front admissions, and you can point the fees to something pro-social and help mollify people about Facebook's low tax rate.