In just the last month the Federal Trade Commission has brokered settlements with Facebook, Google and Equifax over data breaches and mishandling of consumer information.

If you squint, it looks a bit like justice served. For its data management sins Equifax must pay $300 million to a fund for affected consumers with the potential for the fund to grow to cover payments up to $425 million. Google will reportedly pay a multimillion-dollar fine for collecting data and targeting children under the age of 13 in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. And the F.T.C. has approved a $5 billion dollar fine for Facebook for mishandling user data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In an alternate universe, such settlements in such quick succession would be a clear sign that the regulatory might of the federal government is firmly focused on Silicon Valley and consumer data protection. But unfortunately, here in 2019 on Earth-One, this month’s fines aren’t shows of strength but telling admissions of weakness. When it comes to funding, influence and size, the government is simply outmatched by the internet’s largest data guzzlers.

Nowhere is this more true than with Facebook. As Tony Romm reported in The Washington Post this week, the F.T.C. had originally conceived of significantly tougher punishments for Facebook, including fines exceeding tens of billions of dollars as well as direct liability for the company’s c.e.o., Mark Zuckerberg. The report lays out the nuance of the settlement negotiation process, and what I found striking was how it seemed as if — despite being the party in violation of the rules — Facebook appeared to have the upper hand:

Internally, the agency knew that it wasn’t guaranteed to get a multibillion dollar fine and other new commitments from a federal judge. Adding to the trouble, the agency, armed with a relatively small $306 million budget in 2018 that supported roughly 1,100 employees, had to confront the possibility that it might be outmatched in such litigation … A loss also could have immensely damaged the agency, perhaps setting a legal standard that curtailed the commission’s authority to police other tech giants for their privacy and security practices.

Facebook, in other words, is too big to fight. And so it received a fine that is roughly equivalent to a month of the company’s yearly revenue. When news of the fine broke, Facebook’s stock price surged close to a yearly high. Google’s settlement could change the way the company’s algorithms serve advertisements on children’s videos but its fine, too, is paltry. And Equifax’s total payments, arguably the most onerous of all three, represent roughly 17 percent of Equifax’s 2018 revenue. (A substantial portion of the consumer reimbursement is likely to come from Equifax providing free credit monitoring.)