So it's an effective deterrent? What matters is there's a recognized process for it.

What does Facebook call doing something profitable that crosses a legal or ethical boundary before their competitors can do it?

Promotable innovation, probably.

There are some crazy high requirements to become a lawyer though.

Maybe lawyers are operating under mutually assured destruction? You sue me I’ll sue you. You find evidence, I’ll say the evidence needs to be thrown out.

I don’t know if they operate with impunity.

Compare it to tech, where it’s basically ‘you signed the TOS’, and the discussion ends there. We have yet to see a case where someone argues ‘Your TOS was misleading’, which would be the watershed case we’d need to establish some precedent.