Meta’s settlement with state attorneys general is being celebrated as a victory over Big Tech. It may turn out to be something closer to the opposite: a case study in how regulation ends up entrenching the companies it’s meant to restrain.
Meta will pay billions to settle claims involving Facebook and Instagram. More consequentially, it agreed to an elaborate regulatory regime for users under 18—daily use limits, nighttime restrictions, school-hour notification limits, enhanced age verification, restrictions on certain features, stronger parental controls, and scrutiny from an independent auditor and the attorneys general themselves.
Some of this may be sound policy. But stack the pieces together and paradoxes emerge, ones that ought to bother conservatives—and anyone wary of government’s expanding footprint in private markets.
Start with privacy. Part of the original complaint was that Meta collected too much information about children. The fix requires Meta to get considerably better at identifying them. A 15-year-old claiming to be 19 can’t be taken at his word, so Meta needs sharper age-assurance tools—and the harder government pushes to stop teenagers from slipping past the restrictions, the more sophisticated that identification machinery has to get. We are protecting children’s privacy by requiring a company to know more about them.
Parental authority runs into a similar knot. The settlement is billed as empowering parents, and in places it does. But plenty of these decisions used to belong to parents alone, and now they don’t. Nobody’s mother or father decided that two hours was the right amount of Instagram for a 15-year-old—the attorneys general did. Nobody’s parents set midnight as the cutoff either.
Giving Meta a mandate to let parents impose limits is one thing. Having government impose the limits itself, with parents free to loosen them if they notice and bother to act, is another. The first approach hands parents real authority. The second substitutes a state official’s judgment for theirs and calls it choice.
Parents aren’t helpless here, whatever the settlement implies. They buy the phones. They pay the wireless bills. They control the Wi-Fi. Nothing stops a parent from restricting apps, capping screen time or banning phones from bedrooms. Teenagers have been dodging house rules since long before Mark Zuckerberg was born, and the fact that enforcement is hard doesn’t mean the job transfers to a state attorney general.
Regulation by litigation raises its own questions. This settlement dictates when minors can use a communications platform, how long, when notifications may reach them, and which features they encounter—with an independent auditor checking Meta’s compliance every year and the states retaining continuing oversight. Whatever you call that, it functions like regulation.
Except Congress never passed it. No legislature debated whether two hours was the correct limit or midnight the correct bedtime. No agency worked through notice and comment to arrive at these rules. Prosecutors alleged potentially ruinous liability, and a set of product rules got negotiated into existence as the price of making the case go away.
The First Amendment angle deserves a mention too. Social-media feeds are, among other things, distribution systems for speech. Rules governing how lawful information gets recommended or delivered can raise real constitutional questions—even granting that minors’ rights and parental authority complicate the picture. A restriction that would draw constitutional scrutiny if government imposed it directly shouldn’t necessarily dodge that scrutiny because it arrived wrapped inside a consent judgment.
The deepest paradox is economic. For years the government’s message has been that Meta is too powerful—its acquisitions attacked, its dominance targeted for reduction. Now government is loading it up with expensive new obligations: age assurance, content controls, compliance infrastructure, parental-control architecture, an outside auditor checking the work. Meta can absorb costs like that without much trouble. Whether the next Instagram could is a different question entirely. Regulatory compliance behaves like a fixed cost, and a company of Meta’s size bears it far more easily than two programmers building a social app in a garage without Meta’s legal team, engineering bench or compliance department. What antitrust law is supposed to prevent—a barrier that keeps new entrants out—is exactly what this settlement risks building.
One feature of the deal is stranger still: Part of Meta’s eventual payment is tied to whether YouTube, TikTok and SnapChat adopt comparable protections and make comparable payments of their own. Meta, in other words, is actively pushing its rivals to sign onto the same framework. The logic isn’t hard to follow: Restrictions that apply only to Meta put it at a competitive disadvantage, and restrictions that apply to everyone erase that disadvantage. Government has managed something unusual: turning the target of its enforcement action into a lobbyist for extending that enforcement to its competitors.
If Meta broke children’s privacy laws, enforce them. If it deceives consumers, prosecute that. Give parents tools that actually work and hold Meta accountable for honoring the choices parents make. What’s harder to justify is turning prosecutors into product designers, and a settlement negotiated behind closed doors into national technology policy.
The contradiction sitting at the center of all this isn’t subtle. Government insists Meta has grown too powerful, then hands it responsibilities that used to belong to parents while piling on regulatory costs that smaller rivals may not survive. We are, somehow, asking the company to become both less powerful and more responsible for managing American childhood at the same time.
That isn’t a fix for Big Tech’s power. It might be the mechanism that makes it bigger.
This article also appeared in the Wall Street Journal.