> 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.

Exactly. Municipal regulators were unprepared for somebody with a billion dollars willfully breaking laws. And the laws were not a huge deal. For financial regulators, it's their bread and butter, and the laws are most definitely a big deal. Money laundering is a problem they are very serious about because it enables so much other crime.

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...

The feds can come and shut down all of FB over money transmittal, they don't have to limit the shutdown to only the money parts. That's a huge risk to take. If Uber was shut down for violating taxi rules, they only had an unlicensed taxi business.

Could they? Wouldn't Facebook would only be an investor and Libra would be a separate company?

Seems hard to have any prominent integration without having libra related infrastructure on fb servers, and all infra with ”libra” on it is likely to get seized in a raid.

But sure, if libra is just an altcoin on unrelated hardware then fb won’t be affected.

> Seems hard to have any prominent integration without having libra related infrastructure on fb servers, and all infra with ”libra” on it is likely to get seized in a raid.

> 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.

Is this the same feds who all have Facebook accounts, including their families, children, relatives, bosses, and so on? Including everything they buy, everything they look at, their location, and complete profiles of their personality, photos, photos that were taken OF them by other people, likes and dislikes, dirty secrets, and so on?

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.

Spy novels are a hell of a drug.

No one actually doing any of the things you imagined (if they exist) is dumb enough to talk about it on a third party site.

AirBnB and Uber just kinda did it first and then asked permission. Facebook's only tiny hope of that strategy working was to announce Libra as being available first, not announcing the plan to governments first.

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.

Both AirBnB and Uber had the benefit of governments that generally wanted to try to work something out with them.

The difference is that Airbnb and Uber has a lot less to lose. If they got shut down by the govt they could just lose some VCs money. Facebook has a lot more on the line.

Further to that point, Airbnb and Uber are primarily dealing with issues related to local laws, for example in New York City or San Francisco.

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.

Money is the fabric of our economic system for thousands of years. Taxis and accommodation are just tiny services build on that fabric.

Facebook is dealing with different powers here.

This is not a smart position to hold. This administration hates big tech (perhaps fairly, lets not debate politics) and Warren isn't much friendlier.

But airbnb and uber were at a stage where they didn't have much to lose when they first challenged these regulations. Facebook is one of the most well known companies in the world.

FB is going to find useless regulators and governments though. FB is a global company. What's the chance that every country in the world is on top of their game?

The US cares about money laundering by US entities abroad as well and there's no get out of jail free card for "well, the other guys said it was okay". On top of that one of their selling points is how universal and frictionless it's supposed to be. If they can only operate in countries with useless regulation they're kind of doomed on that.