> A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement
The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement provided for "$206 billion over 25 years" starting in 1998 [1]. Inflation adjusted, those cash flows are about $313bn today.
"In 1998, 24.1% of adults were current smokers" [2]. Today, 50% of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, 71% Facebook [3]. Scale up the tobacco settlement to Instagram use and you get $626bn. Scale it up to Facebook and you get $922bn. Add them together and what do you know, we're well past $1.4 trillion.
Also, let's be clear, fining Meta $1.4 trillion doesn't disappear Facebook. It probably doesn't even mean it goes bankrupt. It means current shareholders, including Mark Zuckerberg, lose control. Hell, Meta's lawyers are making a better case for this litigation than the state AGs are.
Hyperbolic downside risk only exists because of the combination of two things.
1) bloated wealth by the asset holder.
2) persisting refusal to countenance any kind of responsibility for their actions operating a fiefdom.
Meta had content review by humans. It worked, badly, but better than the automata. It had massive PTSD risks to the operators, it was costly, and it ate into profits which affected 1) above. So Meta shitcanned it, to avoid cost, and now sits on 2) because what it did subsequently is worse and it doesn't want to admit the cost.
Conflating this with some presumed free speech/libertarian issue is smoke-and-mirrors. This is a T&C space, it is not a free speech venue (nor is X, or Reddit) And the meta people who could editorially remove content don't but have not lost their editorial responsibility which they exercise at other times, and in ways which show they can remove content at will.
> a figure the tech giant blasted as “outlandish.”
Conforming to society's expectations can feel outlandish if you've never been subject to it before.
This is why Reagan-era 90+% top marginal income tax and strong antitrust measures are important - it prevents companies getting to the point when it feels "outlandish" to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth.
First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 dropped it to 50% and when he left office it was at 28%. Basically nobody actually paid the top marginal rate because there were so many exclusions, deductions and shelters. Many of the biggest went away when the rates dropped.
As far as the corporate tax rate, the top marginal rate was 46% in the early 80s and dropped to 34% after the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Accuracy aside, the big problem with your comment is that you're conflating consumer protection with tax rates. You can make all sorts of legitimate arguments about the wealth situation in the world today but let's first acknowledge that not every profit-making company engages in the type of despicable behavior Facebook has.
If corporations were taxed at 90%, you'd see mass conversions to pass-through entities, profit-shifting (moving to overseas domiciles) and capital flight, massive deductible spending to zero out taxable income, a huge drop in domestic investment, a huge increase in debt financing, and so on.
Corporate tax is not meant to be punish businesses for harmful actions they might theoretically engage in. That's what the tort system is for, and even then, the system is primarily compensatory with punitive damages reserved for egregious conduct.
So we don't need to use tax to stop Zuck from Zucking. We need the tort system to work and, arguably, stronger consumer protection laws that acknowledge the harms of these products much the way we eventually acknowledged the harms of products like cigarettes.
> First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s.
First, for accuracy: it was above 90% from WWII up until 1963.
> the wealth situation in the world today
"The (developed) world" is not doing nearly as badly as the US. If the US was more closely aligned with Europe in terms of inequality, it'd be in much better shape.
> let's first acknowledge that not every profit-making company engages in the type of despicable behavior Facebook has.
I in no way claimed otherwise. Perhaps read my very short comment again, more carefully this time.
Moreover, fines this big for companies this big need to become more common. We need to stop thinking that mere millions or billions of dollars can do anything to trillion-dollar megacorporations.
It's like how the EU has been fighting to fine Google some billions of dollars recently. It's supposed to be such a large fine, supposedly one of the largest fines ever issued but it's still practically nothing. It's not even close to significant.
People's brains seem to break with figures this large, billions must feel so large somehow and such an overreach already, but it's really, really not, especially compared to something like Google, or Facebook.
There are so many more orders of magnitude before it starts to matter, it's not even funny, it's just sad.
For example: Google has finally just recently been ordered to pay a €4.1bn fine they've been appealing for eight years. Not only could they have probably originally paid the fine dozens of times over on the spot, but they were able to appeal it for EIGHT YEARS, making for many hundreds or even thousands of times over the fine could've been paid. That fine is literally nothing for them.
just another ruse to destroy competing smaller social media under the guise of "protecting the children" since these big corps can pay these fines, making legal barriers for competition more costly, while "Big Tech" will continue doing "objectionable" things like this
Good. The goal of tech and services is to save the user time, not waste it, social media and AI chatbots are fraudulent. In Rome if you did this you would get Infamia.
> A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement
The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement provided for "$206 billion over 25 years" starting in 1998 [1]. Inflation adjusted, those cash flows are about $313bn today.
"In 1998, 24.1% of adults were current smokers" [2]. Today, 50% of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, 71% Facebook [3]. Scale up the tobacco settlement to Instagram use and you get $626bn. Scale it up to Facebook and you get $922bn. Add them together and what do you know, we're well past $1.4 trillion.
Also, let's be clear, fining Meta $1.4 trillion doesn't disappear Facebook. It probably doesn't even mean it goes bankrupt. It means current shareholders, including Mark Zuckerberg, lose control. Hell, Meta's lawyers are making a better case for this litigation than the state AGs are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4939a1.htm
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/11/20/americans-so...
Hyperbolic downside risk only exists because of the combination of two things.
1) bloated wealth by the asset holder.
2) persisting refusal to countenance any kind of responsibility for their actions operating a fiefdom.
Meta had content review by humans. It worked, badly, but better than the automata. It had massive PTSD risks to the operators, it was costly, and it ate into profits which affected 1) above. So Meta shitcanned it, to avoid cost, and now sits on 2) because what it did subsequently is worse and it doesn't want to admit the cost.
Conflating this with some presumed free speech/libertarian issue is smoke-and-mirrors. This is a T&C space, it is not a free speech venue (nor is X, or Reddit) And the meta people who could editorially remove content don't but have not lost their editorial responsibility which they exercise at other times, and in ways which show they can remove content at will.
Meta AI Labs seems? Having problem?
> a figure the tech giant blasted as “outlandish.”
Conforming to society's expectations can feel outlandish if you've never been subject to it before.
This is why Reagan-era 90+% top marginal income tax and strong antitrust measures are important - it prevents companies getting to the point when it feels "outlandish" to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth.
First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 dropped it to 50% and when he left office it was at 28%. Basically nobody actually paid the top marginal rate because there were so many exclusions, deductions and shelters. Many of the biggest went away when the rates dropped.
As far as the corporate tax rate, the top marginal rate was 46% in the early 80s and dropped to 34% after the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Accuracy aside, the big problem with your comment is that you're conflating consumer protection with tax rates. You can make all sorts of legitimate arguments about the wealth situation in the world today but let's first acknowledge that not every profit-making company engages in the type of despicable behavior Facebook has.
If corporations were taxed at 90%, you'd see mass conversions to pass-through entities, profit-shifting (moving to overseas domiciles) and capital flight, massive deductible spending to zero out taxable income, a huge drop in domestic investment, a huge increase in debt financing, and so on.
Corporate tax is not meant to be punish businesses for harmful actions they might theoretically engage in. That's what the tort system is for, and even then, the system is primarily compensatory with punitive damages reserved for egregious conduct.
So we don't need to use tax to stop Zuck from Zucking. We need the tort system to work and, arguably, stronger consumer protection laws that acknowledge the harms of these products much the way we eventually acknowledged the harms of products like cigarettes.
> First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s.
First, for accuracy: it was above 90% from WWII up until 1963.
> the wealth situation in the world today
"The (developed) world" is not doing nearly as badly as the US. If the US was more closely aligned with Europe in terms of inequality, it'd be in much better shape.
> let's first acknowledge that not every profit-making company engages in the type of despicable behavior Facebook has.
I in no way claimed otherwise. Perhaps read my very short comment again, more carefully this time.
Very sensible comment from HN after a long time as it became reddit-lite.
They deserve it.
Moreover, fines this big for companies this big need to become more common. We need to stop thinking that mere millions or billions of dollars can do anything to trillion-dollar megacorporations.
It's like how the EU has been fighting to fine Google some billions of dollars recently. It's supposed to be such a large fine, supposedly one of the largest fines ever issued but it's still practically nothing. It's not even close to significant.
People's brains seem to break with figures this large, billions must feel so large somehow and such an overreach already, but it's really, really not, especially compared to something like Google, or Facebook.
There are so many more orders of magnitude before it starts to matter, it's not even funny, it's just sad.
For example: Google has finally just recently been ordered to pay a €4.1bn fine they've been appealing for eight years. Not only could they have probably originally paid the fine dozens of times over on the spot, but they were able to appeal it for EIGHT YEARS, making for many hundreds or even thousands of times over the fine could've been paid. That fine is literally nothing for them.
just another ruse to destroy competing smaller social media under the guise of "protecting the children" since these big corps can pay these fines, making legal barriers for competition more costly, while "Big Tech" will continue doing "objectionable" things like this
Good. The goal of tech and services is to save the user time, not waste it, social media and AI chatbots are fraudulent. In Rome if you did this you would get Infamia.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48817191
They are right, it's too much.
Let's reduce it to $1.39T. A company with 10 billion in market cap is still pretty big.