FB is banking (pun unnintended) on the regulators and goverments being absolutely useless lately. Both AirBnB and Uber built empires on ”What if we just ignore the rules”
Municipal regulations. Not federal and state laws with criminal penalties.
Wilfully breaching AML statute is arson to Uber’s parking tickets.
I'm sure Facebook would not be dumb enough to step in front of that train, but if they did, it would run them flat.
There's also a sort of 9/11 effect going on here. The reason the 9/11 hijackers pulled it off was that nobody expected them to use the planes as giant suicide bombs. Previous hijackings generally ended peacefully, so everybody just stayed chill. But that window of opportunity expired before they managed to crash the 4th plane. Now nobody's just going to sit quietly through a hijacking.
Similarly, I think the reason Uber and Airbnb got away with so much lawbreaking is that it was novel to have nominally respectable companies blatantly committing a wide variety of crimes. But these days, tech companies get a lot of suspicion. Regulators are not interesting in getting caught flat-footed again. And that was true 5 years ago; SF vigorously shut down a bunch of entrepreneurs that wanted to sell public parking spaces back to the public: https://www.govtech.com/transportation/SF-Demands-MonkeyPark...
It sure would be a shame if FBI directors in charge of such an investigation were cheating on their wives or were illegally getting kickbacks from contractors. Would be absolutely inconceivable that Facebook might even leak that information to their friends at the CIA or NSA and call in a favor.
But sure, if libra is just an altcoin on unrelated hardware then fb won’t be affected.
> But sure, if libra is just an altcoin on unrelated hardware then fb won’t be affected.
A company as large as fb has the means to segregate application hardware. Hell, even smaller companies do this for liability reasons. If fb didn't it would be pretty lazy and ill conceived.
Plus, taxi and hotel regulations are a very different situation than laws intended to prevent international money laundering, tax evasion, sanction breaking, or black market economies.
New York City shutting down Airbnb doesn't shut them down in the thousands of other cities they're active in. If Boise Idaho restricts Uber, that doesn't suddenly restrict them in Chicago.
The US Government has an entirely different kind of power and when it comes to protecting the global reserve currency, the one guarantee is that they will use it.
Facebook is dealing with different powers here.