> These companies are now too big to fail

I'm not sure why you would think that, and I don't think anything you explained supports that. I'm also not sure it makes any sense at all when applied to Facebook.

Facebook is not going to "fail" over a weekend like Bear Stearns. If it dies, it will be a slow hemorrhaging death, and there will be plenty of time for employees and investors to deal with it. Even if a law were to be passed tomorrow saying they couldn't collect and monetize non-provided personal information and that they couldn't advertise to uses, there would still be a year or two of them wildly trying to pivot, not a collapse over a few days, and the effect on the wider ecosystem of tech wouldn't be all that important.

Saving major financial institutions because they were too bug to fail was not just because they were big, but because the finance sector is all intricately connections, and if a large enough player collapses the cascading effects of missing money could have a very outsized effect and drag the economy down. Facebook? Nobody would really care. A competitor or new alternative would absorb the users fairly quickly. The only thing of value that would be lost, and probably not even that, is the list of people you're friends with.

Honestly, Google might not be much more important, other that they just employ way more people. Probably not Apple either (having to switch to Android/Window is an inconvenience, not a major life change). Amazon would actually have a big effect though. The amount they've integrated themselves into the supply chain for normal people and how many people sell on it would cause major disruptions if it were to disappear within a year or two. Or maybe not, I'm sure Walmart would love for you to use them instead, or Alibaba. Nothing says the American company has to be the preferred one for Americans.

In the case where actual prosecution was conducted, as you suggest - what would be the opening price on the Monday morning for the share price? Bear Sterns peak valuation was 20billion, Facebook sits at 1,000billion. Just wiping half that value off over a weekend would be 'not a great day in the financial markets' - if no other stock moves (and they will), it's -5% on the Nasdaq on the first tick of the day. People would lose money, some probably a lot of money, in May 2021 Facebook was the most widely owned stock by hedge funds.

Now I am not suggesting anyone should lose sleep over some billionaires losing a bit of money - 'people would get over eventually'. However it would come down to a question of political will rather than points of law to persue a meaningfully prosecute or reduce the power of Facebook (and others) in any way, and any aftermath, as short term as it may be, would be considered to be self-inflicted by the politicians that conducted the exercise.

Tech is, through its collective behavior and practices, interconnected. If the political will emerges to curtail tax evasion, monetization, etc in the sector, the valuations of every tech company conducting their affairs similarly would be called into question.

> In the case where actual prosecution was conducted, as you suggest - what would be the opening price on the Monday morning for the share price? Bear Sterns peak valuation was 20billion, Facebook sits at 1,000billion.

The stock market is mot the same as the synthetic derivatives market. One of the main reasons we had such a problem with synthetic derivatives, is that it hid the fact that a lot of these instruments were worth much less than thought, so when it was realized the extremely troubles housing market was linked in a way that wasn't quite understood previously, a whole bunch of losses were realized after the fact. There's a huge difference to that than any other sort of news.

The biggest difference is that in the case of Facebook at an announcement of a prosecution, the stocks of Facebook have the exact same value immediately after, and only start dropping as people start selling, and respond to how people react. Unlike synthetic derivatives, there is no inherent value backing it (which normally you would think is worse, but when that inherent value is made of or mortgages and a large chunk have used legal means to wipe out their debt, that value is forever eroded).

The simple answer to the price is it would drop, but over some time. Some people would wait for more info, or think they could beat the case. Those people that laft would invest their money somewhere else. Some would put it in non-tech stocks, others would choose tech stocks they thought immune from the coming shift in privacy (if that's what the prosecution seemed to foretell). The important thing is that most wealth would not be destroyed, but just shifted to somewhere else.

For synthetic derivatives, what's not what would have happened. Bear Sterns failing entirely would have meant that any of their repackaged derivatives would have also had problems. Everyone was sitting on investments (CDOs) where they couldn't easily tell if they had lost 5% or 10% or 50% of the value because it was repackaged so many times, and there was a real concern that other companies would fall like dominoes as the few percent worse the Bear Sterns/Lehman Brothers situations made it, which in turn exacerbate others.

As for Facebook and the NASDAQ, I think you'd see a far lower impact. Even if the equivalent of 5% of NASDAQ's cap was lost from Facebook, I think a large chunk of that would flow to other stocks on NASDAQ. Facebook's loss is other company's gain. Probably Apple's, I would think, for people that still want that portion of investment in tech but want something less likely to be negatively impacted because of more stringent privacy requirements.