Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/stay-of-execution.html
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Facebook’s $5B FTC fine was so laughable its stock price went UP after the announcement
The stock price going up is not ipso facto proof that the $5B fine was “laughable.”
Markets hate uncertainty. People who want to invest will wait until that uncertainty has been removed. Its extremely common for stock prices to rise after a penalty, even a high penalty, because the uncertainty of that penalty has now been removed.
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Good BoingBoing reply. I must have been wondering why the share price would go up, and this is obviously it. Much as I would (apparently, inwardly) like to imagine Zuckerberg as The Joker…
“$5B? Is that all you got? Ha ha ha! Now, what do you pay for THIS?..” [ presses giant red button ].
It is always better, if a little less dramatic sometimes, to know the facts. We know we are supposed to boo when the pantomime villain appears, but it is better to know what he is actually doing, and whether he is getting away with it.
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Cough up, like, 1% of your valuation and keep up the good work, says FTC: In draft privacy deal, Facebook won’t have to change a thing
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Correct, although the larger certainty re-established here is that it will continue to be business as usual when it comes to the FTC letting Facebook and the other social media companies skate by on egregious violations. Late-stage capitalist markets love toothless government regulators.
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Yep. I learned this when I saw the tobacco settlements… all their stocks went up, too, once they struck a deal.
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i left the face book + instagram and i am happy i did.
some of the most miserable points in my life was when my instagram was most “on fleek”, getting “mad likes”. i was traveling so much because home didn’t feel so good!
it is funny running into people i haven’t seen in a while, they seem to assume if someone isn’t in their feed for a while they are dead. rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated
i also think some uh, “rekindlings” (romantic or platonic) i’ve had since moving back to a city i used to live in would not have happened if they’d slowly drip drip dripped info since we last saw each other… being forced to sit down, have a coffee/beer/other things and chat about what’s changed since we last met is more authentic.
if you’re not a jerk about it (i’ve had the same phone number since the bush administration, i’m accessible), people find it refreshing. some even join me in ditching fb and installing signal. every hipster i feed fernet and convince to install The Other Blue App is like reaching into zuck’s pocket and removing a 20 and it feels good.
the strength of a network is n^2:
so every one of us who ditch it helps more than you’d think
ps: nice pentagram wikipedia
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idiots. this was a perfect opportunity for a predatory fine where nobody could complain (except FB). They should seat a judge from one of the tiny Fla. towns that subsist on fines.
OK another take might be the stock went up because everyone thought “wow, it’s safe now”.
SCOTUS broke the Standard Oil monopoly into regional firms in 1912. The chairman painfully told his disbanding board, “Boys, it’s just one damn thing after another!” But each company’s stock value quickly doubled. Moral: Breakups are profitable.
Meanwhile, Zuck is satanic. Exorcism doesn’t work. Damn.
Look on the bright side. This is a very important brick in the Russian Interference wall.
the best zuck fact i know is he works in a glass office, but if you take a pic of him you’ll be ejected from the campus #metaphors
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The company had already announced that most likely, this fine was coming. Now that it came, it turned an uncertainly into reality, so… no more uncertainty, and thus, stock price goes up.
Now, the scale of the fine is really a separate topic, so intertwining the two is not something I would have done. If anyone cares, my take is that fines like this against corporations are indeed nothing more than a cost of doing business; not that big a deal. Real teeth need to be put into such fines, such as the second offense would see the fine increase in orders of magnitude, or the company getting broken up. Or executives being indicted and sent to jail.
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