[koralatov]

Oh, I absolutely realise I'm oversimplifying it, but the point stands that, in most cases, it's in Facebook's interest to massively underreport value as part of that negotiation.

For example, say they invent a new way of compressing jpegs which saves them bandwidth and storage costs. Facebook could report that as costing them money: "Oh, that cost us $120,000 in programmer time to devise and implement".

It's entirely possible that this is true, but it's only half the picture: that new compression algorithm might have saved them twice that or more in bandwidth costs.

In this instance, it's 'efficient' for Facebook to report one part and then conveniently ignore the other. But the question remains is it honest? Surely the value of that technology is somewhere between the cost to create and the costs it's saved?