Kidron Calls Big Tech Control Generational Injustice

The proposed reform addresses the harms visited on children by Big Tech’s platforms while leaving intact the structure that made those platforms profitable in the first place. This is not an oversight. It is the function of reform when it is framed, as Baroness Beeban Kidron frames it, as a matter of “the way we use it” rather than what it is built to do.

Kidron calls this a generational injustice, and she is not wrong about the injury. But name the mechanism she leaves unnamed: these companies do not sell a service that occasionally goes wrong. They sell attention, harvested and sold again, and the harvesting is more efficient the younger, more anxious, and more compulsively returning the user. A child staring at a screen at midnight is not a bug in the system. She is the yield. To say the technology is neutral and only its use is at fault is to say the factory is neutral and only the fourteen-hour shift is the problem - true in the narrowest sense, and false in the sense that matters, because the factory was built to extract that shift and will resist any reform that shortens it.

This is why “challenging the control of Big Tech,” as the Baroness puts it, can mean two entirely different projects wearing the same words. One project asks these companies to redesign their interfaces, age-gate their products, publish transparency reports, and appear before committees looking suitably chastened. The corporations comply, because compliance of this kind costs little and buys a great deal - it converts a legitimacy crisis into a compliance department. The other project asks who owns the infrastructure of children’s attention and whether that ownership should exist in its current form at all. Only the second project touches the accumulation logic; the first merely gives it better manners.

Watch what gets proposed against what gets contested. The contested claim - that the injustice is generational and structural - is the one worth defending. The comfortable move, the one Big Tech’s own lobbyists will happily fund research to support, is the retreat into “usage,” because usage can be regulated by parental controls and screen-time settings, purchased at the app store, marketed as empowerment. FRANCE 24 reports the Baroness’s words without asking her the only question that matters: does she mean to break the business model, or improve its optics?

A child does not need a kinder algorithm. She needs a world that has stopped deciding her value in advance, by the hour, in her sleep.