Meta ordered to pay 25 billion dollars over Cambridge Analytica
New Mexico state lawyers succeed where eight years of federal enforcement failed, sum amounts to a few weeks of company revenue
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Meta has been ordered to pay a 25-billion-dollar penalty over the Cambridge Analytica case, Business Insider reports. The order did not come from Washington. It came from state lawyers in New Mexico, who spent years on a scandal the federal government had left unresolved since it broke in 2018.
The Cambridge Analytica affair established that personal data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles had been harvested for political profiling without users' consent. The Federal Trade Commission answered with a five-billion-dollar settlement in 2019, paid without admission of wrongdoing. Congress held hearings and legislated nothing. The state lawyers kept going — and produced a penalty five times the size.
State attorneys general do not have the litigation budgets of the agencies in Washington, and they do not face a defendant worth more than a trillion dollars on equal terms. Their solution has been to retain private outside firms on contingency — counsel paid a share of the recovery only if they win. The arrangement reverses the usual enforcement economics. A federal agency's appropriation arrives whether it settles cheaply or not at all; a firm on contingency that loses absorbs its own costs. Lawyers who bear the consequences of their own performance litigate differently, and New Mexico's number is the arithmetic of that difference.
What the penalty buys is a separate question. Meta books 25 billion dollars in revenue every few weeks, so the sanction is at once the largest the company has ever faced and a sum the advertising business turns over before the next quarterly report. The conduct the case punished ended nearly a decade ago; the profiling practices it grew out of underwrote the targeting system that still sells the ads. A fine that arrives eight years late and is payable from current cash flow works less as a deterrent than as a deferred price for the business model — settled after the fact, with the intervening years' profits kept.
The FTC settled for five billion in 2019, and its budget was never at stake. The state lawyers who collected five times that worked for years with no guarantee of being paid.