The Australian government has, in a fit of pique that would make Diocletian blush, doubled the penalty for social media platforms that flout its ban on under-age users. The maximum fine now stands at a staggering A$49.5 million – a sum that would have bought you a decent-sized province in the late Roman Empire, or at least a very fine villa in Campania. But what does this mean for Britain, which now contemplates its own sovereign clampdown?
Let us be clear: this is not merely a technical adjustment to some obscure regulatory code. It is a declaration of war against the digital imperium that has, for two decades, treated national borders as quaint relics of a pre-internet age. The social media giants – these modern-day Visigoths with their algorithms and targeted advertising – have long operated with the impunity of a corporation-state. They collect our data, shape our discourse, and, most gallingly, decide what our children see. Australia has decided to push back.
But is this the salutary example of a vigorous commonwealth defending its young, or the last gasp of a nation too small to matter? The British government, ever eager to appear decisive while avoiding actual controversy, now rattles its own sabre. Ministers murmur about a “sovereign” internet, about protecting children from the corrosive effects of platforms that have turned adolescent anxiety into a business model. Yet one must ask: can a digital clampdown actually work?
History offers a cautionary tale. When the Roman Empire tried to ban the mystery cults of the East, it only drove them underground. When Victorian Britain tried to suppress the penny dreadfuls, it merely made them more alluring. Prohibition, whether of substances, ideas, or social media, has a habit of creating black markets and intensifying the very behaviours it seeks to extinguish. The Australian penalty, for all its ferocity, may simply drive the problem offshore, into encrypted apps and dark corners where parental oversight is even more impossible.
And yet, there is an argument to be made – an argument that appeals to this columnist’s contrarian heart. Perhaps we have been too timid. Perhaps the real error is in treating social media companies as legitimate businesses rather than as utilities or even as quasi-governments. If Facebook or TikTok were to be regulated with the same seriousness as, say, a water company or a broadcaster, then the entire calculus changes. The fine is not the point: the point is the principle. A nation that cannot control the information environment within its borders is not truly sovereign.
Britain, with its imperial history and its current post-Brexit search for a role, might just be the laboratory for a new form of digital sovereignty. The Australians have given us a template: high penalties, strict enforcement, and a willingness to offend the sensibilities of Silicon Valley libertarianism. But the British, true to form, will probably produce a compromise that satisfies no one: a few fines, a bit of hand-wringing, and a lot of expensive lawyers.
If we are serious about protecting our children from the attention merchants, we need more than fines. We need a cultural revolution – a return to the idea that childhood is a time for play, for boredom, for face-to-face interaction, not for the curated anxiety of social media. The Romans, for all their faults, knew that a child’s education was a matter of the state. We have outsourced it to algorithms. Australia’s move is a start, but it is not enough. Britain should follow suit, but with a vigour that matches the scale of the problem. Otherwise, we are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, all while our children scroll themselves into oblivion.
