Why is IOI so scared of the feds in Ready Player One?

Question

The book "Ready Player One" portrays a corporate dystopia where the feds have basically no power and no one respects the government.

Yet seemingly, IOI, (the company that runs the sixers) while they have no problem killing anyone, they're very particular in following federal law , for example:

Luckily, the Genetic Privacy Act made it illegal for IOI to sample my DNA.

How and why are the weak federal government's laws still respected by IOI especially when they have no compunction killing anyone?

Answer 1

My assumption is that the key difference is between routine and extra-ordinary activities. The following is all speculative, not based on anything concrete in the book.

IOI is willing to break laws and kill people in the hunt for the Egg. The number of times it does this and the number of people watching for them doing it is low and zero respectively.

The Genetic Privacy Act is a piece of bureaucratic legislation, which while it protects individuals is only useful for companies if done on mass. Just like today, companies don't use the browsing data of a single individual to target advertising, they use composites built from huge data sets. So in order to get anything out of the breaking the GPA, they'd have to do it a lot and make the result data available to a large number of people/teams within the company. And while there are government agencies looking for companies breaking these laws, there are also potentially large numbers of individuals and NGOs doing the same, just like they do over privacy violations today. So, IOI would have to do it a lot, and there are a lot of people watching.

This makes breaking the GPA a much higher risk than the odd murder, which is why IOI don't do it.

Answer 2

It's quite simple and goes to definition of law: Law is a system of rules that are created and enforced through social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior. The key word here is "enforced". The government, via institutions of police and military, has monopoly over usage of force on a territory. Behind every law is ability to enforce it, aka use physical force to make someone comply to the law (and punish the law breaker, of course). As powerful as IOI is, they are not powerful enough to go against the government. It still has the ability to take their assets, put them on trial, even forcefully remove every one of them from their offices/beds and shoot them on the street and no one would be able to stop them.

Without the ability to enforce the law, there is no law. There is no government.

Answer 3

As noted by j01storm, people follow laws because they might be punished for transgressing. However, they also follow laws because it sets the rules of the game, which protects them from others. Take, for example, a game of football. Normally, everyone plays by certain rules of how you're allowed to tackle other players (no eye-gouging, no clipping, no excessive violence after the player is down) as much because they don't want to be thrown out of a game as anything else. But what if the "referee" doesn't really have any power, perhaps because you're playing a pickup game in the neighborhood? People still follow the rules, because, if they start tackling people dangerously, they run the risk of others following suit and attacking them. Thus, everyone keeps the peace and agrees to run by those rules, bending them at most, or breaking them covertly, but not doing so openly.

Admittedly, in the case of genetic sampling, this doesn't seem like something that would be a major issue, all in-house matters, but it might also be the principle of the matter, that they don't want to get into the habit of routinely breaking the rules lest the general structure of rules be seen as something that can be disregarded.