It’s to show that they have the “power” to make people do whatever they want. Sure, the average Janes and Joes know that apology was half-assed, but they now know that the government will come after you if you do anything out of line.

So, one of the guys at work just exported graphics for one of our marketing sites as SVG, and it became a 3.5 MB monstrosity that would be orders of magnitude smaller if he had just exported it as a JPEG or even a PNG.