FTC fine doesn’t spell closure for Facebook

Facebook may be close to putting a Federal Trade Commission investigation behind it. But it faces a variety of other probes in Europe and the U.S., some of which could present it with even bigger headaches.

While the $5 billion fine from the FTC, which Facebook has been expecting, is by far the largest the agency has levied on a technology company, the real worries for Facebook — and its investors and the companies that use it to advertise on its service — are the other restrictions and government oversight that might come with it. This goes for the other investigations as well, which span the globe from the European Union, Germany, and Belgium to New York, Canada and elsewhere.

“This fine signals that regulators are ratcheting up the pressure,” said Dimitri Sirota, the CEO of BigID, a business data privacy company, in an email. He said that the FTC action, together with recent European fines on British Airways and Marriott, shows that regulators around the world are getting bolder in cracking down on data privacy violations. Facebook may think the fine is easily affordable, he said, but it hurts its image and trustworthiness.

Beyond the regulatory investigations, Cowen analyst John Blackledge noted that Facebook and other big companies also face broader antitrust concerns .

Facebook has enjoyed more than a decade of unfettered growth as Silicon Valley’s golden child, trusted to regulate itself and keep its 2.4 billion users’ in

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