This is kind of alarming to me. A fine should scale with the the greater of the harm done and the amount needed to deter the behavior. But that's not what's happening here; instead, people are proposing that the fine scale with Facebook's total revenue. Even Facebook's most ardent critics probably don't believe they derive a majority (or really even a significant amount) of revenue from the lax API controls companies like Cambridge Analytica relied on. The fine should be sufficient to ensure that nobody at Facebook thinks that being lazy about access to user profiles in their APIs is a good business decision. It should not, in effect, be a litigation of whether Facebook is on the whole a good idea.
I don't think Facebook (as constituted) is a good idea! But that doesn't mean I think the FTC should be able to fine it existentially, unless an existential fine is really what it takes to defer the specific thing they did that was unlawful. There's no evidence that $5B --- a record high fine equivalent to the entire cost of several well-known startups Facebook could have otherwise acquired rather than lighting that money on fire --- is insufficient to the task.
I don't think Facebook (as constituted) is a good idea! But that doesn't mean I think the FTC should be able to fine it existentially, unless an existential fine is really what it takes to defer the specific thing they did that was unlawful. There's no evidence that $5B --- a record high fine equivalent to the entire cost of several well-known startups Facebook could have otherwise acquired rather than lighting that money on fire --- is insufficient to the task.