An $18bn settlement - and Zuckerberg barely blinked. The tech titans must be stripped of their power, and soon | Jonathan Freedland

A fine is meant to be felt. This one was priced like a toll.

The harm, as the mothers and fathers described it, was to the body: sleep interrupted, attention frayed, girls of thirteen keeping a lit screen beside the pillow the way one keeps a candle in a draught. The remedy, however, was addressed not to any physician but to the ledger. And the ledger, I am told, did not so much as look up. The shares held their price on the day of the settlement. That single figure instructs me more than the whole judgment.

I have crossed ferries that drowned a passenger every season. The villagers knew the crossing was dangerous; they crossed anyway, because the far bank held the market. When a price was at last fixed for the drownings, the ferry kept its schedule. A toll that does not slow the traffic was set too low. So here: the road stays open, the traffic runs by night as by day, and the parents are congratulated on a great victory. They have won a receipt.

The columnist says these titans must be stripped of their power, and soon. I have some acquaintance with the difference between paper authority and actual command of a road. The Sultan’s firman yielded wherever the Khan’s horsemen stood. One does not strip a potentate by invoice; one closes his road, revokes his licence to ford the river, sets inspectors at the pass with power to say no. Arithmetic apologises. Command changes the traffic.

So the injuries are real, the money is real, the road is unchanged, and all three facts sit in the same country without embarrassment. The victory parade did not pass through the market. The market was open all day, trading as usual, and noticed nothing worth closing for.

The fine was announced as a victory. The market answered within the hour, and its answer was a shrug: the shares did not fall. I have learned to trust such answers more than any statement issued to the press, for a price cannot flatter and cannot be flattered.

When I was young, Parliament fined the mill owners for children caught in the unguarded machinery. The owners sat with their ledgers and found that the fine came to less than the cost of fencing the wheel. So they paid the fine, and the wheels turned unguarded, and the children kept arriving at the infirmary with fingers missing. Nobody said the arithmetic aloud. The ledger said it: the maiming was cheaper than the guarding.

So it is here. The claim is accountability. The observation is a balance sheet that absorbed the blow without noticing. Between those two documents lies the whole question: whether a harm that can be bought at this price is a harm the buyer intends to stop.

Mrs. Ellery in the next street keeps her granddaughter’s supper warm while the girl sits elsewhere, summoned by the small glass in her pocket. The settlement cannot call that girl back to the table. Only the fencing can do it - the machinery altered so that the summons loses its grip. A fine the payer does not feel is not a punishment. It is a price, and a price is a permission.

The campaigners deserve their triumph; I do not withhold it. But I note what the owners of this enterprise noted, in the only language they speak fluently. They were asked to stop. They were shown the cost. They compared the two, and chose the cost.

Freedland wants this to be a story about a man who didn’t blink. I understand the appetite - a face, a flinch, a readable moral weather report. But the detail he hurries past on the way to his conclusion is the share price, and I want it in the middle of the table.

The stock didn’t dip. Not a shiver. Which means the harm was already priced - the actuaries had run the tables on damaged teenagers, found the number acceptable, folded it into guidance and multiples and the calm of the quarterly call. Those children were a line item before the first lawyer filed. The indifference Freedland locates in one man’s face is actually distributed across every portfolio that holds the thing and sleeps soundly.

So my plain question, put to the whole room: strip them of power - over what, exactly? The man at the top cannot blink; the blink belongs to the ticker. Take the founder’s votes tomorrow and the machine still needs engagement the way a furnace needs air. Whoever sits in the chair becomes the chair. Impunity isn’t a personality. It’s an architecture.

He says follow the money; I did, and it doesn’t lead to a therapy room. It leads to general funds and fee schedules, a healthy slice to the suits. The children get a press conference.

Which is why I’m warmer to the campaigners than the column allows. They forced a real number onto a real ledger and made somebody sign for it. That isn’t nothing - it’s a receipt. And a receipt is precisely what you get when the purchase was expected.

The battle he names is real. I’d only rephrase it: not strip the titans, but find the organ that actually feels pain. It isn’t the founder. It isn’t the face. And it isn’t us. Yet.