Facebook is in a world of hurt, or so it would seem, after The New York Times published a splashy, five-byline exposé last week that documented the social-media giant’s ponderous, self-serving response to Russian infiltration of its platform. Ditto Amazon, the e-commerce juggernaut that recently cajoled New York City into coughing up billions of dollars in tax breaks to host a new office building, provoking sustained liberal outrage. Netflix is facing new rules governing its film and television libraries in Europe. Google, we are told, has its own problems, from selling A.I. to improve drone strikes to the news it reportedly paid out a top executive $90 million despite the fact that he allegedly coerced a colleague into sex. If you only got your news on Twitter, you might imagine the gold rush is over for the so-called FAANGs—as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google are known—and that the era of Big Government regulation is about to begin.

On Wall Street, however, bankers are betting that Americans don’t really care about reining in Silicon Valley—and that Congress, for the most part, doesn’t really care, either. One senior Wall Street executive recently told me the story of how he and his colleagues coincidentally happened to be in Washington last April, when Mark Zuckerberg was testifying before the Senate. He and his partners were meeting with congressional staffers, with members of the Trump administration, and with various regulators to discuss the question of FAANG regulation, and whether or not it was going to happen. The message they received was crystalline: “The one thing that nearly all of them agreed on,” this person said, “was whatever was going to happen, in terms of real regulation, real reform, potentially real anti-trust activity, would all depend on—literally three different people used this exact phrase—‘how long the circus stays in town.’”

His point was that there still is no natural, large constituency for regulating any of the major tech companies that dominate portions of the U.S. economy. What legislators and aides were conveying, this person told me, was that they believed the outrage was limited. “This is a big deal to a very small subset of people,” he said, including parts of the media, people in the tech world, people who have to compete against these companies, and privacy advocates. But, the congressional staffers told my source, “We’re not getting calls on this. Nobody’s marching on Washington because they’re upset about Facebook. When we go home to our districts, nobody’s showing up in our town halls and complaining about Instagram or complaining about Amazon. And, when that’s not happening, it’s really hard to keep attention paid to any sort of real action. And we all know how much inertia and friction there is in getting anything done in Washington in general. But if you don’t have that kind of push behind it, there’s no chance of it even really getting done.”

The question still to be answered on Capitol Hill was, will there be another shoe to drop? “Will there be something that keeps this in headlines in a way where we feel like we have to do something?” he continued. “Or where our constituents finally really do start to care about this?” (The Times story may well turn out to be the catalyst that keeps the circus in town.)

With Democrats taking back control of the House of Representatives in January, tech critics are hoping to finally see some sort of action. But among the financiers and investors who make their living predicting Washington interventions—and who spend vast sums to prevent them—there’s little worry that lawmakers will follow through. The Wall Street executive told me that there was “a lot of eye-rolling” in the technology industry when politicians in Washington first started to call for hearings, which he described as mostly just “political theater.” After all, he explained, the kind of data mining that started freaking everyone out—such as the “psychographic” targeting allegedly conducted by Cambridge Analytica in 2016—has been going on for years, away from politics. “It wasn’t anything that hadn’t been done a million times before and in a way that it was encouraged to be done—to sell people soda, to get people to sign up for credit cards, to promote a new car or a movie that was coming in that weekend,” he said. “And all the same sort of questionable uses of private data or influence around those things largely went unnoticed.”