Defaults are not limits
A default two-hour daily limit for under-18s, counted across Facebook and Instagram together. A default block between midnight and 6am. Strengthened age assurance to keep under-13s off the platforms. Most of it in place for at least a decade.
That is a legal settlement specifying interface behaviour, which is a reasonably new thing to see written down.
Read the word “default” twice, though. Both the time limit and the nighttime block can be lifted by a parent. The mechanism is not a limit. It is a setting, shipped in the on position, with a documented route to switching it off. Anyone who has watched a fifteen-year-old negotiate will recognise the design.
The cap also covers Facebook and Instagram. It does not cover TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat or Discord, which is where the two hours will go.
Meta appears to have noticed this. The states receive roughly 70% of the headline figure unless TikTok and YouTube also adopt one-hour limits, night mode and age assurance of their own. Several billion dollars turns not on Meta’s behaviour but on its competitors’. If the others sign up, the nighttime block widens to 10pm until 7am.
That is not a company accepting a penalty. It is a company using one to buy industry-wide parity, where a restriction applying to everybody costs nobody anything in relative terms.
I wrote a while back about safety measures that become loopholes. This is the more interesting version. The safety measure works exactly as specified, and the party being constrained helped write the specification.
The remedies will probably do some good. Defaults matter, and most people never change them. But a default with an off switch, and four competitors sitting outside its scope, is a smaller thing than the headline number suggests.