Meta's $25 billion fine is one-ninth of what the law actually allowed.

…(cont) Eight weeks before this verdict, forty-seven states closed a different account: up to $17.1 billion for building Instagram and Facebook to addict children. California's attorney general said the deal would make the platforms "less dangerous for our kids." Three weeks later, the real math arrived: Meta made $130 billion off the same underage users in the period it was being sued for exploiting them. The settlement covers about thirteen cents of every profit dollar. Hon, that is not a penalty, that is a cost of doing business, filed on time.

The company keeps the other side of its ledger open too. Senate Democrats wrote Meta on October 14th that it had used a research-and-development tax credit — written for laboratories, not warehouses — to cut $6.6 billion off its federal tax bill for the data centers it is building to run on exactly the kind of user data this trial says it took without consent.

Two days after that letter, Bloomberg Law reported that Justice Department leadership ordered prosecutors in the Western District of Virginia to close a separate, years-old criminal investigation into Meta over allegedly profiting from illegal drug sales on its platforms — after lobbying from Meta's own legal team, and after the company's money reached President Trump's political operation. Five days after that, a New Mexico jury did what the Justice Department had just declined to.

Add up what is open on the books this month: one federal probe closed, one 2019 fine of $5 billion, one child-safety settlement running about thirteen cents on the profit dollar, one tax credit worth $6.6 billion, and one $25 billion order a state calls historic and the statute calls a fraction. Only one number moved money out of Meta toward the public this week. It came from a jury, not a department.