Why should Sony have to pay anything to make up for the outages? If the outages were caused by an outside attack that is criminal in nature, why should the company that was the victim of the attack have to make reparations for it? It's not like Sony was responsible for the attacks. Besides we've, sadly, come to expect hactivists groups to engage in acts that do nothing but annoy the people they say they're trying to help.

You could say that the compensation is make Sony's public image look better to people who experiences outages, but the compensation may not help due to a certain dynamic among the current public. Let's take my ISP, for example. My internet works about ninety to ninety-five percent of the time. Ask me what I think of my ISP and you will be met with a long string of compound expletives. My focus is on the five percent of the time that my internet fails me, not the ninety-five percent of the time that my internet works. This focusing on the negative is the dynamic I mean. I am sure that I am not alone in focusing on the five percent of bad times as it relates to any number of things, including online services. No matter how much Sony does to try to repair the relationship it has with it's customers, many of those customers will still dwell on the five percent.