Cupertino d'État

We are going to start actually, Mike, with a story that was suggested by one of our Patreon supporters.

And we're going to expand on that.

Our first big story really looks at child safety announcements made by Apple this week.

But it kind of begins somewhere in the with the ongoing dance between politicians who are clearly keen to win votes and big tech companies who many voters have taken a keen dislike to.

So one of our patron supporters, Joe, highlighted a story last week that was previewing a speech by my fair prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, in London Tech Week this week.

And Keir, this article kind of highlighted, was going to insist that Google and Apple would do more to keep kids safe.

And The focus of that particular story was the fact that Google and Apple execs could face prison time if they didn't do so.

And I know you love stories like this.

I know you've got things to say.

When this story kind of made it into our signal chat, what did you make of it?

I mean, it's just, it's the same old thing.

And it's very much, and that original article came out before he'd given the speech and then he gave the speech.

And it was basically, it was the exact encapsulation of the nerd harder problem, which was these companies better wave their magic wand and not allow anything bad to happen on their platform or they're going to jail.

And like, it's just so unrealistic and it creates such confusion.

twisted incentives where not only are you asking for the impossible, you're then threatening literal prison time for not doing the impossible.

That doesn't create good incentives for actually building better systems that are actually safer for children.

And so I find this very performative and showy and not particularly helpful or realistic.

Yeah, there's a reasons why politicians use the prison time threat.

We won't go into the kind of depths of that.

But yeah, it doesn't create the right incentives.

I think, as you say, the speech actually took place this week on Monday.

And the thing that was reported very widely was a three month deadline.

for Google and Apple to prevent nudity on those platforms.

So basically Starmer said you've got three months to ban nude images on children's devices as part of an effort to keep kids safe.

And for those of you not very close to UK politics right now, Keir Starmer is under a lot of pressure.