Which means that most fines likely to be considered by the F.T.C. might amount to what Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, described to me as “a parking ticket and a news release.”

Some with insider experience disagree. A former F.T.C. consumer protection official told me Thursday that if the numbers they’d heard around the fine are real, “they might not be transformative to the bottom line” but would be “symbolic of the gravity.” Similarly, they believed the organization could add requirements that “change the way Facebook handles and shares data. I’d be very surprised if Facebook didn’t continue in the same general lines of business, but operating with more restrictions,” they said.

David Carroll, a professor at the New School, who took legal action against Cambridge Analytica in the United Kingdom, agreed that, “no fine would be adequate for a monopoly. Advertisers, users, and investors do not register the fines in their economic activity. [They’re] still buying, using investing. It causes no material harm to Facebook. It’s just bad PR.”

What does he have in mind? “Seizure of servers, criminal penalties against corporate directors and Stop Data Processing orders would actually be painful penalties,” he argued. Or, even more intense, “force Facebook to delete its user data and models and start from scratch under rigorous collection restrictions."

Of course, Facebook is not likely to see anything resembling Mr. Carroll’s proposals anytime soon; most ideas would likely be dismissed as wildly radical. And certainly without precedent.

And yet the scope of Facebook’s recent privacy scandals in the last two years has little precedent either. A quick, partial rundown:

A security flaw that potentially exposed the public and private photos of as many as 6.8 million users on its platform to developers (the company told the told European regulators almost two months after discovering the bug and waited almost three months before disclosing publicly ).

A separate “bug” that exposed up to 30 million users’ personal information in late September. Among the information exposed: emails and phone numbers, and profile information including recent search history, gender and location.

An admission that the company "unintentionally uploaded" the email contacts of 1.5 million new Facebook users since May 2016.

And, of course, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where data from tens of millions of users was misappropriated and shared to be used for profiling for political campaigning

“Everyone is thinking backward about a fine for what they did wrong,” Jason Kint, the chief executive of the trade group Digital Content Next, told me. He argued that the F.T.C.’s framework is out of date and should instead reflect the more progressive industry standard for tech giants of “aligning data usage with consumer expectations.” Under that model, Mr. Kint suggests the F.T.C. consider something similar to the German government’s February decision to restrict Facebook’s data gathering (specifically the ability for Facebook to collect and combine third-party data account advertising profiles).

Should the F.T.C. go with the expected wrist-slap of a fine, it’ll be flatly ignoring a broader sense of mounting frustration over user privacy and the monolithic nature of Big Tech.