"The War on Children" Explained by The Cyber Show
The Cyber Show has a new article entitled "Consumer protection and the war on children" (or "The War on Children" as the front page puts it). It is dated today or last night and it says:
Technology companies are strangers. Remind me, what did we tell our children about taking sweets…?
Understanding trust-relations in real-life is hard, and a hundred times harder in the digital world. We know that children find it difficult, so we try to help them, and we as adults think we know a thing or two about it. In reality we must admit we know almost nothing consciously. Even the greatest experts who have studied game theory, strategy, logic, law, psychology and intelligence fare no better than average on a high-street confidence scam. The digital world is an extremely hostile place.
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As so many commentators have already noted, if social media is so corrosive to children then surely adults need protection too. This is an insightful and devastating argument against social media giants and government half-measures. Adults do indeed need protection, but not from all the same harms enumerated by tools like the Online Safety Act. There are other shared and hidden hams that adults and children suffer alike, but which seem inconvenient for governments to name out-loud.
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Starting with e-commerce in the 1990s we've made a total nonsense of the legal conceits of agreement and informed consent. The law lost its way.
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Consumer law is an absolute disgrace and is the palpable source of harms against billions of people. The designation of computer and communication end-users as "consumers" directly visits harms, We seem to focus only on the content delivered and not the circumstances of the audiences. Many of the harms associated with social media and online services have roots in poor legal protections while the actual content served, and ways to manage it, is a distinct issue.
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However a different approach is possible. One of the weapons that governments still have against Big Tech is their own national commerce and contract laws. In the fight against Big Tech it's time governments extricated from failed international trade agreements such as WIPO and the WTO and commenced a campaign against the entire defunct legal landscape.
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Once Big Tech realise that under genuine laws to protect citizens they cannot possibly operate their data-extraction rackets, and once people realise that all Big Tech really has to offer is deceit in one form or another, we can go our separate ways, and jolly good riddance. That opens space for new companies and organisations, and for citizens themselves to build new digital services that respect basic rights and freedoms. Who knows, maybe some of these services will provide value instead of trickery and mercenary manipulation?
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