alt Hacker NewsI don't think fines are enough of an incentive. They're too easy to evade and insufficiently consequential to the people who are actually shipping code. Moreover, making them enormous (as you put it well "valuation-cratering") unfairly punishes people who are not directly responsible for the failure. Instead, like in other engineering disciplines, Engineers need to be personally liable for the consequences of failure. Not necessarily every engineer--not every mechanical engineer needs to be a P.E.--but someone directly responsible for the quality of the work needs to stake their reputation on it, and suffer the consequences when it fails.
In practice this would mean that you need to show conformance to some kind of security process. The actual outcome of that process is of secondary importance as long as you can show that you’re compliant. Very carefully written process documents _can_ improve things, but my confidence in security processes is low for companies without intrinsic motivation.
I think one can reasonably argue that sufficiently large fines that don’t have a „but we followed iso-xyz“ loophole could produce better outcomes. The difficult part is making the companies care about existential tail risks.