Analysts are expecting big things from Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) earnings Wednesday, a performance once associated only with companies like Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL).

Facebook earnings for the quarter ending March 30, due to be reported after the market closes May 3, are expected to be over $2.6 billion or $1.12 per share, on revenue of $7.85 billion and there are whispers that the number could go over $2.8 billion, or $1.21 per share.

Four years ago, that top line would have covered the entire year, and the bottom line would have blown past estimates. FB stock has quadrupled in size while dramatically increasing its profitability. That is why investors pay 43 times earnings for the stock, and 13 times its revenue.

Such is the power of the cloud.

Because Facebook decided to build its own cloud centers, and launched the Open Compute Project in 2011 to make this simpler and cheaper, it can lead the cutting edge of technology like no other service company.

The secret to Facebook is simple. It’s the cloud, stupid.

Facebook Is the Second Google

The resulting company is a lot more like Alphabet’s Google than analysts admit. Like Google, it depends on advertising, tied to intrinsic knowledge of who is reading each ad, which in turn is based on their browsing behavior.

This intrinsic ad model is enormously wasteful, in that it delivers ads people don’t want to see at times they don’t want to see them. But FB stock has so much inventory it still delivers more value to advertisers than they would get by letting publishers define audiences, using extrinsic targeting that shows readers ads based on the content they are looking at.

The result has been to destroy the publishing business model. Alphabet gets much of the blame for destroying the ad model, but Facebook has replaced the editors, as readers spend hours on “news” feeds that aren’t news at all, just things their Facebook “friends” are doing, saying or interested in.

To win attention, publishers are reduced to creating mass audiences with clickbait aimed at getting a lot of readers, rather than a target audience. There is no premium for aggregating an audience around a place, industry or lifestyle, and “fake” news crowds out the real thing.

Taking Responsibility

Only in the last few months has CEO Mark Zuckerberg agreed to take responsibility for this, with a listening tour that looks a lot like a political campaign.

But admitting that you have a problem is not the same as keeping it from happening. Now that its role in civic discourse is acknowledged, FB stock is subject to ad hominem attacks on what its algorithms do naturally — follow behavior and tailor ads to it — which can lead anyone down a rabbit hole.

The problem will not be fixed by just tweaking the Facebook news feed to bury clickbait and “fake news.” The problem lies in the center of the service, and the business model. And Facebook is having to make changes in the light of intense, global publicity, from governments and interests who feel threatened by it.

Facing FB Stock’s Future

Facebook can continue to grow, but it may find that the 50% profit margins of 2016 were a high-water mark. Facebook is also coming up against the law of large numbers — it’s harder to grow a big number than a small one.

Growing from here is also going to mean dealing with skeptical governments in places like China and India, governments that claim that they should control the horizontal and the vertical of their people’s lives, not some outside algorithmic force. Facebook had $29 billion in cash and short-term securities at the start of the year with which to respond, a pittance next to rivals like Alphabet and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), and it is under far more direct threat.

Thanks to the cloud, however, the company’s shares open May at a record level of over $150 each, a market cap of over $440 billion. FB stock is the fifth-largest company in the U.S. by market cap, having displaced Berkshire-Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) during the most recent quarter. It is number five with a bullet, but investors should ask, where is the bullet?

Dana Blankenhorn is a financial and technology journalist. He is the author of the political polemic Saving Trumpistan, Restoring Democracy, available now at the Amazon Kindle store. Write him at danablankenhorn@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @danablankenhorn. As of this writing he owned shares in FB, GOOGL and AAPL.