Re: Foreboding Forecast?
"Take the rap, pay the fines, and carry on? Sounds unlikely"
Not as unlikely as you may think. There is a common economic practice in business called "Managed Externalities". At its basic level it involves passing costs out of your business to some third party. For example, you might engage a courier to deliver all your internal mail as running the deliveries yourself is more costly (or you might outsource your IT call centre to a cheap, off-shore company...).
Externalities can, however, be used for much darker purposes, such as in the case of pollution where companies rely on environmental programs and charities to clean up their mess rather than pay for it themselves.
In one case a certain Airline had suffered a number of fatal crashes over a period of time and were hauled up by aviation authorities to explain themselves. It turned out that the airline had failed to install all of the safety equipment and perform the safety checks they should've. Their excuse was the cost involved vs the "low incident" of crashes. The Courts disagreed and set astronomical fines for each and every life lost or injury inflicted due to the failing of safety procedures - the idea was that the airline would find it cheaper to see to safety than to pay the fines.
Instead, the airline used externalization to solve the problem - they raised flight fares to cover the potential cost of paying the fines and blamed "new legislation" for the price hike.
Its entirely possible that FB and co. will simply raise their advertising rates for the same reason and thus externalize the entire problem. Given that they have already failed to externalize the moral issues to legal process and/or user behavior I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them take this path, or possibly even charging the users a nominal fee and covering it up as a "premium, no advertisements or unsolicited material" style account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_externalizing
Biting the hand that feeds IT
