Houston Chronicle by Tony Romm 7/12/2019
The Federal Trade Commission voted this week to approve a roughly $5 billion settlement with Facebook that could end an investigation into its privacy practices, according to a person familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak on the record, a deal poised to result in unprecedented new government oversight of the company.
The settlement -- adopted along party lines, with the FTC's three Republicans supporting it and two Democrats against it -- puts in motion an end to a wide-ranging probe into Facebook's mishandling of users' personal information that began more than a year ago.
The FTC's $5 billion punishment against Facebook sets a new record as the largest penalty ever assessed against a tech company that broke a past promise to the government to improve its privacy practices -- more than 200 times greater than the previous largest fine. The matter from here rests in the hands of the Justice Department, which typically must finalize such FTC settlements, though DOJ rarely has upended them.
"It's quite a substantial amount of money, and it sets a baseline [for] the Googles and Microsofts and Apples and the Twitters of the world," said David Vladeck, a former director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection who is now a law professor at Georgetown University. He said the real test of the agency's work -- to hold Facebook accountable for its missteps and deter other tech giants -- would depend on final details that the FTC has not yet revealed.
But some critics still assailed the FTC on Friday for approving a fine that's small in comparison to Facebook's massive profits. Democratic Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who oversees an antitrust panel in the House, described the agency's efforts on Friday as a "slap on the wrist."
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