With countless jokes on Twitter behind us, let’s briefly assess The Verge’s report about Facebook planning a company name change: this should have happened sooner.

I don’t mean that a new name should have debuted along with all the metaverse talk earlier this year, or that a rebranding would have lifted much of the whistleblower pressure Facebook feels right now (it won’t). If this has been the inevitable direction for the company, something it’s been building toward steadily since acquiring Oculus, then the change should have happened years ago. Instead, all of these AR, VR and now metaverse projects are now inseparable from the baggage the name Facebook carries. That can’t be wiped clean.