> A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement
The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement provided for "$206 billion over 25 years" starting in 1998 [1]. Inflation adjusted, those cash flows are about $313bn today.
"In 1998, 24.1% of adults were current smokers" [2]. Today, 50% of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, 71% Facebook [3]. Scale up the tobacco settlement to Instagram use and you get $626bn. Scale it up to Facebook and you get $922bn. Add them together and what do you know, we're well past $1.4 trillion.
Also, let's be clear, fining Meta $1.4 trillion doesn't disappear Facebook. It probably doesn't even mean it goes bankrupt. It means current shareholders, including Mark Zuckerberg, lose control. Hell, Meta's lawyers are making a better case for this litigation than the state AGs are.
Hyperbolic downside risk only exists because of the combination of two things.
1) bloated wealth by the asset holder.
2) persisting refusal to countenance any kind of responsibility for their actions operating a fiefdom.
Meta had content review by humans. It worked, badly, but better than the automata. It had massive PTSD risks to the operators, it was costly, and it ate into profits which affected 1) above. So Meta shitcanned it, to avoid cost, and now sits on 2) because what it did subsequently is worse and it doesn't want to admit the cost.
Conflating this with some presumed free speech/libertarian issue is smoke-and-mirrors. This is a T&C space, it is not a free speech venue (nor is X, or Reddit) And the meta people who could editorially remove content don't but have not lost their editorial responsibility which they exercise at other times, and in ways which show they can remove content at will.
> a figure the tech giant blasted as “outlandish.”
Conforming to society's expectations can feel outlandish if you've never been subject to it before.
This is why Reagan-era 90+% top marginal income tax and strong antitrust measures are important - it prevents companies getting to the point when it feels "outlandish" to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth.
First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 dropped it to 50% and when he left office it was at 28%. Basically nobody actually paid the top marginal rate because there were so many exclusions, deductions and shelters. Many of the biggest went away when the rates dropped.
As far as the corporate tax rate, the top marginal rate was 46% in the early 80s and dropped to 34% after the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Accuracy aside, the big problem with your comment is that you're conflating consumer protection with tax rates. You can make all sorts of legitimate arguments about the wealth situation in the world today but let's first acknowledge that not every profit-making company engages in the type of despicable behavior Facebook has.
If corporations were taxed at 90%, you'd see mass conversions to pass-through entities, profit-shifting (moving to overseas domiciles) and capital flight, massive deductible spending to zero out taxable income, a huge drop in domestic investment, a huge increase in debt financing, and so on.
Corporate tax is not meant to be punish businesses for harmful actions they might theoretically engage in. That's what the tort system is for, and even then, the system is primarily compensatory with punitive damages reserved for egregious conduct.
So we don't need to use tax to stop Zuck from Zucking. We need the tort system to work and, arguably, stronger consumer protection laws that acknowledge the harms of these products much the way we eventually acknowledged the harms of products like cigarettes.
I just want to chime in. “Basically nobody” is not nobody. Usually when people speak about these tax rates they are looking at too 1% tax receipts but the ultra wealthy .01% certainly got a payday with Reagan subsequent tax cuts have benefited them tremendously. https://economicsinsider.com/us-wealth-inequality-1965-2025/ has a nice graph. The paydays for the extremely wealthy do not tend to pop up on reports because we do not report down to that level - most top out at too 1% or .1%. But those with the most money and ability to influence our lives with it having been having a //great// few decades.
The actual data: in 1963, 501 out of around 50 million filers were affected by the top marginal rate.
According to the Tax Foundation, the actual average effective tax rate for the top 1% of earners in 1962 was only ~16%. That's because, again, there were massive legal deductions, exemptions and shelters that were permitted to basically ensure that very few people actually paid this rate of tax.
You are correct that the wealthiest of the wealthiest (the top 1% of the top 1%) have seen their fortunes explode in recent years, and there are big issues with this.
But when you're talking about Facebook's despicable behavior and how to deal with it, I don't see how "bring back a marginal tax rate of 90%!" is a viable solution to this problem. The obvious solution is to ensure you have strong consumer protection laws and enforcement and a functioning tort law system.
I do think there is obviously an issue with the influence the wealthy have on regulators and their ability to play the court system, but here's a problem: the wealthiest of the wealthy are still going to be the wealthiest people even after you tax them, and the government's dependence on their wealth for tax revenue can become its own problem.
Taking the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement as an example, you now have state and federal governments that rely heavily on continuing tobacco revenue because the hundreds of billions of dollars of settlement payouts are directly tied to the future sales of cigarettes. Therefore, the state and federal governments want people to keep smoking because if they don't, the tobacco companies wouldn't be able to keep up the settlement payments. It's quite perverse actually, and we should be wary of a similar Big Social Media settlement wherein the government has reason to push for Facebook's continued financial success.
> First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s.
First, for accuracy: it was above 90% from WWII up until 1963.
> the wealth situation in the world today
"The (developed) world" is not doing nearly as badly as the US. If the US was more closely aligned with Europe in terms of inequality, it'd be in much better shape.
> let's first acknowledge that not every profit-making company engages in the type of despicable behavior Facebook has.
I in no way claimed otherwise. Perhaps read my very short comment again, more carefully this time.
> First, for accuracy: it was above 90% from WWII up until 1963.
Reagan took office in 1981. Is it that difficult to acknowledge that you posted something that was inaccurate, and move forward from it?
Also, as noted, basically nobody ever actually paid these rates.
> "The (developed) world" is not doing nearly as badly as the US. If the US was more closely aligned with Europe in terms of inequality, it'd be in much better shape.
Wealth inequality is higher in the US than it is in Europe, and this certainly has some nasty effects. But there's still significant wealth inequality in Europe and Europe has its own major economic problems, including wage stagnation, higher inflation (largely due to overdependence on imported energy), slower GDP and productivity growth, lower R&D spending, high structural unemployment (in some countries), greater reliance on bank lending due to weaker markets for equity financing, an overall environment that makes it harder for high-growth businesses to emerge, etc.
If you could somehow reduce wealth inequality in the US while avoiding the ills that plague Europe, then yes, the US would be "in much better shape."
We should also note that Europe isn't a country. In Sweden, the top 10% hold almost 75% of the wealth. In Germany, it's around 63%. Belgium has the lowest figure at around 43%. In the US, the top 10% holds 68% of the wealth, but what distinguishes it from countries like Sweden and Germany is the stunning growth in what the top 1% holds.
> I in no way claimed otherwise. Perhaps read my very short comment again, more carefully this time.
Your comment directly implied that taxation should be used to prevent companies from "getting to the point when it feels 'outlandish' to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth."
This isn't the purpose of taxation and if you tried to use it as such, you'd fail spectacularly.
> Is it that difficult to acknowledge that you posted something that was inaccurate, and move forward from it?
What I take serious issue with is the deceptive and uncharitable nature of your "correction", which didn't mention that the number I quoted was real and in effect up until 1963.
The reason you're behaving like that is that in your desperate desire to defend the infrastructure that supports oligarchs, you need to cling to minor nitpicks because you don't have any serious points to make.
> Your comment directly implied that taxation should be used to prevent companies from "getting to the point when it feels 'outlandish' to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth."
Quoting my exact comment is not describing an implication. Perhaps you'd like to take another stab at incorrectly describing whatever you're imagining that I'm implying.
> What I take serious issue with is the deceptive and uncharitable nature of your "correction", which didn't mention that the number I quoted was real and in effect up until 1963.
"Reagan-era" is the 1980s. You were off by almost two decades. That warranted a correction.
And as I noted, the number of people who this rate actually applied to was unbelievably small. To put it in precise terms: in 1963, only 501 returns out of approximately 50 million filers actually paid this rate. According to the Tax Foundation, the actual average effective tax rate for the top 1% of earners in 1962 was only ~16%. That's because, as I noted, there were tons of exclusions, deductions and shelters permitted, the biggest of which were removed as the tax rates were lowered.
Taking the position that tort law and consumer protection regulation, not punitive tax rates that will never actually be paid, is the way to deal with corporations behaving badly is common sense, not pro-oligarch.
Moreover, fines this big for companies this big need to become more common. We need to stop thinking that mere millions or billions of dollars can do anything to trillion-dollar megacorporations.
It's like how the EU has been fighting to fine Google some billions of dollars recently. It's supposed to be such a large fine, supposedly one of the largest fines ever issued but it's still practically nothing. It's not even close to significant.
People's brains seem to break with figures this large, billions must feel so large somehow and such an overreach already, but it's really, really not, especially compared to something like Google, or Facebook.
There are so many more orders of magnitude before it starts to matter, it's not even funny, it's just sad.
For example: Google has finally just recently been ordered to pay a €4.1bn fine they've been appealing for eight years. Not only could they have probably originally paid the fine dozens of times over on the spot, but they were able to appeal it for EIGHT YEARS, making for many hundreds or even thousands of times over the fine could've been paid. That fine is literally nothing for them.
I've always marveled at fines that are well below the culprit's proceeds. If you can drag out and minimize a fine, is it really a punishment or just a tax/cost of doing business?
Imagine that I am a bank robber. I rob the bank for $10 million The court forces me to pay a $3 million fine. I am now $7 million richer and justice is restored - how wonderful!
Good. The goal of tech and services is to save the user time, not waste it, social media and AI chatbots are fraudulent. In Rome if you did this you would get Infamia.
just another ruse to destroy competing smaller social media under the guise of "protecting the children" since these big corps can pay these fines, making legal barriers for competition more costly, while "Big Tech" will continue doing "objectionable" things like this
> A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement
The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement provided for "$206 billion over 25 years" starting in 1998 [1]. Inflation adjusted, those cash flows are about $313bn today.
"In 1998, 24.1% of adults were current smokers" [2]. Today, 50% of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, 71% Facebook [3]. Scale up the tobacco settlement to Instagram use and you get $626bn. Scale it up to Facebook and you get $922bn. Add them together and what do you know, we're well past $1.4 trillion.
Also, let's be clear, fining Meta $1.4 trillion doesn't disappear Facebook. It probably doesn't even mean it goes bankrupt. It means current shareholders, including Mark Zuckerberg, lose control. Hell, Meta's lawyers are making a better case for this litigation than the state AGs are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4939a1.htm
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/11/20/americans-so...
Hyperbolic downside risk only exists because of the combination of two things.
1) bloated wealth by the asset holder.
2) persisting refusal to countenance any kind of responsibility for their actions operating a fiefdom.
Meta had content review by humans. It worked, badly, but better than the automata. It had massive PTSD risks to the operators, it was costly, and it ate into profits which affected 1) above. So Meta shitcanned it, to avoid cost, and now sits on 2) because what it did subsequently is worse and it doesn't want to admit the cost.
Conflating this with some presumed free speech/libertarian issue is smoke-and-mirrors. This is a T&C space, it is not a free speech venue (nor is X, or Reddit) And the meta people who could editorially remove content don't but have not lost their editorial responsibility which they exercise at other times, and in ways which show they can remove content at will.
Meta AI Labs seems? Having problem?
> a figure the tech giant blasted as “outlandish.”
Conforming to society's expectations can feel outlandish if you've never been subject to it before.
This is why Reagan-era 90+% top marginal income tax and strong antitrust measures are important - it prevents companies getting to the point when it feels "outlandish" to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth.
First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 dropped it to 50% and when he left office it was at 28%. Basically nobody actually paid the top marginal rate because there were so many exclusions, deductions and shelters. Many of the biggest went away when the rates dropped.
As far as the corporate tax rate, the top marginal rate was 46% in the early 80s and dropped to 34% after the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Accuracy aside, the big problem with your comment is that you're conflating consumer protection with tax rates. You can make all sorts of legitimate arguments about the wealth situation in the world today but let's first acknowledge that not every profit-making company engages in the type of despicable behavior Facebook has.
If corporations were taxed at 90%, you'd see mass conversions to pass-through entities, profit-shifting (moving to overseas domiciles) and capital flight, massive deductible spending to zero out taxable income, a huge drop in domestic investment, a huge increase in debt financing, and so on.
Corporate tax is not meant to be punish businesses for harmful actions they might theoretically engage in. That's what the tort system is for, and even then, the system is primarily compensatory with punitive damages reserved for egregious conduct.
So we don't need to use tax to stop Zuck from Zucking. We need the tort system to work and, arguably, stronger consumer protection laws that acknowledge the harms of these products much the way we eventually acknowledged the harms of products like cigarettes.
I just want to chime in. “Basically nobody” is not nobody. Usually when people speak about these tax rates they are looking at too 1% tax receipts but the ultra wealthy .01% certainly got a payday with Reagan subsequent tax cuts have benefited them tremendously. https://economicsinsider.com/us-wealth-inequality-1965-2025/ has a nice graph. The paydays for the extremely wealthy do not tend to pop up on reports because we do not report down to that level - most top out at too 1% or .1%. But those with the most money and ability to influence our lives with it having been having a //great// few decades.
The actual data: in 1963, 501 out of around 50 million filers were affected by the top marginal rate.
According to the Tax Foundation, the actual average effective tax rate for the top 1% of earners in 1962 was only ~16%. That's because, again, there were massive legal deductions, exemptions and shelters that were permitted to basically ensure that very few people actually paid this rate of tax.
You are correct that the wealthiest of the wealthiest (the top 1% of the top 1%) have seen their fortunes explode in recent years, and there are big issues with this.
But when you're talking about Facebook's despicable behavior and how to deal with it, I don't see how "bring back a marginal tax rate of 90%!" is a viable solution to this problem. The obvious solution is to ensure you have strong consumer protection laws and enforcement and a functioning tort law system.
I do think there is obviously an issue with the influence the wealthy have on regulators and their ability to play the court system, but here's a problem: the wealthiest of the wealthy are still going to be the wealthiest people even after you tax them, and the government's dependence on their wealth for tax revenue can become its own problem.
Taking the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement as an example, you now have state and federal governments that rely heavily on continuing tobacco revenue because the hundreds of billions of dollars of settlement payouts are directly tied to the future sales of cigarettes. Therefore, the state and federal governments want people to keep smoking because if they don't, the tobacco companies wouldn't be able to keep up the settlement payments. It's quite perverse actually, and we should be wary of a similar Big Social Media settlement wherein the government has reason to push for Facebook's continued financial success.
> First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s.
First, for accuracy: it was above 90% from WWII up until 1963.
> the wealth situation in the world today
"The (developed) world" is not doing nearly as badly as the US. If the US was more closely aligned with Europe in terms of inequality, it'd be in much better shape.
> let's first acknowledge that not every profit-making company engages in the type of despicable behavior Facebook has.
I in no way claimed otherwise. Perhaps read my very short comment again, more carefully this time.
> First, for accuracy: it was above 90% from WWII up until 1963.
Reagan took office in 1981. Is it that difficult to acknowledge that you posted something that was inaccurate, and move forward from it?
Also, as noted, basically nobody ever actually paid these rates.
> "The (developed) world" is not doing nearly as badly as the US. If the US was more closely aligned with Europe in terms of inequality, it'd be in much better shape.
Wealth inequality is higher in the US than it is in Europe, and this certainly has some nasty effects. But there's still significant wealth inequality in Europe and Europe has its own major economic problems, including wage stagnation, higher inflation (largely due to overdependence on imported energy), slower GDP and productivity growth, lower R&D spending, high structural unemployment (in some countries), greater reliance on bank lending due to weaker markets for equity financing, an overall environment that makes it harder for high-growth businesses to emerge, etc.
If you could somehow reduce wealth inequality in the US while avoiding the ills that plague Europe, then yes, the US would be "in much better shape."
We should also note that Europe isn't a country. In Sweden, the top 10% hold almost 75% of the wealth. In Germany, it's around 63%. Belgium has the lowest figure at around 43%. In the US, the top 10% holds 68% of the wealth, but what distinguishes it from countries like Sweden and Germany is the stunning growth in what the top 1% holds.
> I in no way claimed otherwise. Perhaps read my very short comment again, more carefully this time.
Your comment directly implied that taxation should be used to prevent companies from "getting to the point when it feels 'outlandish' to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth."
This isn't the purpose of taxation and if you tried to use it as such, you'd fail spectacularly.
> Is it that difficult to acknowledge that you posted something that was inaccurate, and move forward from it?
What I take serious issue with is the deceptive and uncharitable nature of your "correction", which didn't mention that the number I quoted was real and in effect up until 1963.
The reason you're behaving like that is that in your desperate desire to defend the infrastructure that supports oligarchs, you need to cling to minor nitpicks because you don't have any serious points to make.
> Your comment directly implied that taxation should be used to prevent companies from "getting to the point when it feels 'outlandish' to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth."
Quoting my exact comment is not describing an implication. Perhaps you'd like to take another stab at incorrectly describing whatever you're imagining that I'm implying.
> What I take serious issue with is the deceptive and uncharitable nature of your "correction", which didn't mention that the number I quoted was real and in effect up until 1963.
"Reagan-era" is the 1980s. You were off by almost two decades. That warranted a correction.
And as I noted, the number of people who this rate actually applied to was unbelievably small. To put it in precise terms: in 1963, only 501 returns out of approximately 50 million filers actually paid this rate. According to the Tax Foundation, the actual average effective tax rate for the top 1% of earners in 1962 was only ~16%. That's because, as I noted, there were tons of exclusions, deductions and shelters permitted, the biggest of which were removed as the tax rates were lowered.
Taking the position that tort law and consumer protection regulation, not punitive tax rates that will never actually be paid, is the way to deal with corporations behaving badly is common sense, not pro-oligarch.
Very sensible comment from HN after a long time as it became reddit-lite.
First of many I hope, god bless.
they ruined a generation of healthy individuals. deserved!
They deserve it.
Moreover, fines this big for companies this big need to become more common. We need to stop thinking that mere millions or billions of dollars can do anything to trillion-dollar megacorporations.
It's like how the EU has been fighting to fine Google some billions of dollars recently. It's supposed to be such a large fine, supposedly one of the largest fines ever issued but it's still practically nothing. It's not even close to significant.
People's brains seem to break with figures this large, billions must feel so large somehow and such an overreach already, but it's really, really not, especially compared to something like Google, or Facebook.
There are so many more orders of magnitude before it starts to matter, it's not even funny, it's just sad.
For example: Google has finally just recently been ordered to pay a €4.1bn fine they've been appealing for eight years. Not only could they have probably originally paid the fine dozens of times over on the spot, but they were able to appeal it for EIGHT YEARS, making for many hundreds or even thousands of times over the fine could've been paid. That fine is literally nothing for them.
I've always marveled at fines that are well below the culprit's proceeds. If you can drag out and minimize a fine, is it really a punishment or just a tax/cost of doing business?
Imagine that I am a bank robber. I rob the bank for $10 million The court forces me to pay a $3 million fine. I am now $7 million richer and justice is restored - how wonderful!
They are right, it's too much.
Let's reduce it to $1.39T. A company with 10 billion in market cap is still pretty big.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48817191
Good. The goal of tech and services is to save the user time, not waste it, social media and AI chatbots are fraudulent. In Rome if you did this you would get Infamia.
just another ruse to destroy competing smaller social media under the guise of "protecting the children" since these big corps can pay these fines, making legal barriers for competition more costly, while "Big Tech" will continue doing "objectionable" things like this