Facebook's $5 Billion FTC Fine is an Embarrassing Joke
That, as The New York Times' Mike Isaac points out, is the real story here: the United States government spent months coming up with a punishment for Facebook's long list of privacy-related bad behavior, and the best it could do was so weak that Facebook's stock price went up. From some other perspectives, that $5 billion fine is a big deal, of course: it's the biggest fine in FTC history, far bigger than the $22 million fine levied against Google in 2012. And $5 billion is a lot of money, to be sure. It's just that like everything else that comes into contact with Facebook's scale, it's still entirely too small: Facebook had $15 billion in revenue last quarter alone, and $22 billion in profit last year. The largest FTC fine in the history of the country represents basically a month of Facebook's revenue, and the company did such a good job of telegraphing it to investors that the stock price went up.
That, as The New York Times' Mike Isaac points out, is the real story here: the United States government spent months coming up with a punishment for Facebook's long list of privacy-related bad behavior, and the best it could do was so weak that Facebook's stock price went up. From some other perspectives, that $5 billion fine is a big deal, of course: it's the biggest fine in FTC history, far bigger than the $22 million fine levied against Google in 2012. And $5 billion is a lot of money, to be sure. It's just that like everything else that comes into contact with Facebook's scale, it's still entirely too small: Facebook had $15 billion in revenue last quarter alone, and $22 billion in profit last year. The largest FTC fine in the history of the country represents basically a month of Facebook's revenue, and the company did such a good job of telegraphing it to investors that the stock price went up.
