Justice, in America, comes in denominations. On the same September Friday it arrived for two of the world’s biggest technology companies in two of its available forms. In Santa Fe, it arrived as a verdict. In Alabama, it arrived as a cheque.

The verdict was the older kind. A jury in New Mexico found Facebook liable under the state’s consumer protection law, according to Al Jazeera, and counted the violations one by one: more than 43 million of them, as the Associated Press reported, each a discrete act of deception against users the company had told it was protecting their privacy.

The two-week trial in Santa Fe, Fortune reported, centred on accusations that Facebook, owned by Meta, deceived users about a data breach that began with a third-party personality quiz — a quiz that harvested data from roughly 87 million profiles and sold it to a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica. After the verdict, the state’s Department of Justice released a statement:

The verdict marks a significant victory for New Mexico consumers and holds one of the world’s largest technology companies accountable for its conduct

What Meta will pay is now for a judge to decide, and the arithmetic is simple. Attorneys for the state are seeking the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation, according to the Associated Press. Multiplied across more than 43 million violations, that comes to upwards of $215 billion. Fortune put the potential exposure, conservatively, at over $200 billion. The number a jury counts can be a large number.

In Alabama, the reckoning was quieter and came with a wire transfer. TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, agreed to what Al Jazeera described as the company’s first-ever settlement with an American state — days before its scheduled trial, which is generally when settlements of this kind are reached.

The terms, per CNBC: a minimum of $100 million to Alabama, rising to as much as $300 million if 40 other state attorneys general sign on to similar agreements within a specified window. The trial that will now not happen was to have heard arguments about the app’s potential effects on the mental health of minors, The Hill reported. The New York Times called the deal the latest in a string of high-profile settlements over claims that social media is addicting children.

Along with the money come restrictions, according to Deutsche Welle: a two-hour daily limit for teenage users, pauses after 15 minutes of use, restricted access for children. The Guardian noted that the deal was modelled on the agreement Meta itself recently reached with US states — a template now, purchasable and replicable, the way the tobacco settlements once were.

There is a difference between the two outcomes, and it is not only the number of zeroes. A verdict names a thing. It says: this happened, 43 million times, and we are counting. A settlement names a price and declines to name much else. First-ever settlement with a state — the qualifier doing quiet work, implying the states still waiting, the trials still on calendars, the negotiations already under way.

Days before its scheduled trial. The phrase recurs in the record of American corporate accountability. The trial was the threat. The cheque was the answer.