FTC FINES FACEBOOK $5 BILLION, IMPOSES NEW PRIVACY OVERSIGHT: It’s a lot of cash, but critics call the deal a win for Facebook and its CEO.

Technology expert Ashkan Soltani, who served as the FTC’s chief technologist for a time during the Obama administration, said on Twitter that the settlement “was a terrible outcome for our leading privacy regulator and a very sweet deal for Facebook.” He added that, “If this were a game of chess, Facebook just checkmated FTC, flipped the board so it couldn’t be played again, and covered the whole thing up with a blanket.”

Soltani is not alone in his assessment. Several lawmakers have already heaped scorn on the arrangement. “The FTC not only fell short, it fell on its face,” Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said. “Facebook is getting away with some of the most egregious corporate bad behavior in the age of the Internet,” he added. “This outcome is an insult to consumers.”

The frustration isn’t limited to Democrats, either. “This is very disappointing,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said. “This settlement does nothing to change Facebook’s creepy surveillance of its own users and the misuse of user data. It does nothing to hold executives accountable. It utterly fails to penalize Facebook in any effective way.”

FTC Chairman Simons, for his part, pointed to the law as the major issue. For the second time in a week, he called on Congress to pass privacy legislation and give the FTC authority to enforce it.

“We are a law enforcement agency without the authority to promulgate general privacy regulations,” Simons said. “Our authority in this case comes from a 100-year-old statute that was never intended to deal with privacy issues like the ones that we address today.”

The commission only had two choices, he continued: “One, settle on excellent terms⁠—or two, litigate for years and likely come away, even from a favorable court decision, with far less relief than we announced today. Would it have been nice to get more? To get $10 billion instead of $5 billion, for example? To get greater restrictions on how Facebook collects, uses, and shares data?”

Maybe so, Simons implied, but the agency “cannot impose such things by our own fiat.”

Earlier: What Is To Be Done About Facebook? From Christine Rosen of Commentary, with a mention of Glenn’s new book.