There’s reason to fear Meta’s historic $18B settlement will mostly help . . . the lawyers

Eighteen billion dollars sounds like a number that should change something. It probably will change something, just not what you'd hope. When the settlement machinery cranks up, the first checks tend to go to the people who built the machinery. That's not cynicism, it's arithmetic. Class-action structures are set up so that fees get calculated before harm gets measured, and by the time you work out who actually lost what, the lawyers have already been made whole many times over.

Meta absolutely deserves to pay for what it did. Nobody here is defending a company that treated user data like a company parking lot. But there's a difference between justice for the people harmed and a payday for the people who filed the paperwork. Watch what happens to the actual claimants in a settlement this size. They'll get notice letters written in language a law professor would need a dictionary for, deadlines that quietly expire, and checks in the tens of dollars if they bother to file at all. Meanwhile the firms that brought the case, and often the state officials who cut deals alongside them, walk away with sums that dwarf what any individual victim sees.

This is the racket nobody wants to call a racket because it wears the costume of accountability. Government officials get to announce a historic win. Attorneys get a fee schedule that would embarrass a hedge fund. Press releases go out. And somewhere down the list, after the percentages are carved off the top, is the person whose information actually got misused.

We're not against holding Big Tech's feet to the fire. We just think the fire should warm the people who got burned, not the guys standing next to it with a torch and a bill.