There has been so much noise around social media and the promise of a “big tech crackdown” that you would be forgiven for thinking that real change was afoot. A “social media kids ban” absent proper digital product safety regulation would be an admission of harm, yet miss the opportunity to impose safety requirements on the companies themselves.

Big tech is increasingly compared to big tobacco, an analogy that makes sense due to both industries’ pernicious lobbying tactics and hostility to public-interest research into their products’ consumer harms. Perhaps lawmakers have decided that the harmful design choices and powerful software woven through popular apps and websites are, like cigarettes, best cordoned off until young brains and bodies are deemed ready to access them.