On: An $18bn settlement - and Zuckerberg barely blinked. The tech titans must be...

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.