Another Advantage to Facebook for Being First

The widely expected IPO filing from social media company Facebook may hit the street this week in an offering that could value the company at more than $85 billion. There are a lot of advantages to being first in a new market, but Facebook pushed one favorite technology maxim to its limit.

The saying goes, “Do it now and apologize for it later.” Facebook did exactly that with the way that the company extended the ways in which it gather private data about its users. It has been forced, finally, by federal regulators to rein in the ways in which it captures and uses private information, but the company had the advantage of actually helping regulators set the limits for companies that may want to compete with Facebook — limits that didn’t apply to Facebook. Following the company’s agreements, no future competitor can stare into the eyes of a federal regulator and claim insouciantly: “Gee, sir, we’re just college dropouts. We had no idea that was not allowed.”

Facebook got away with it, but no one else will.