Matt Levine, Columnist

Facebook Negotiated Its Rules

Also stock buybacks, investing while driving and lunch valuation.

July 23, 2019 at 4:00 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Apparently Facebook Inc. will pay a $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission for doing some bad privacy stuff, and will agree to take some steps to stop doing so much bad privacy stuff in the future. (There’ll be a committee.) The settlement is not official yet but has been pretty well previewed. I have always found this particular Facebook privacy scandal—it’s the Cambridge Analytica one—sort of puzzling, and the specific terms of the settlement aren’t really public yet, so I don’t propose to get into the substance of it.

But I do want to talk about this article by Tony Romm in the Washington Post, about the negotiations and back story around the settlement, because it is the most illuminating thing I have read about U.S. regulation generally in a long time.