Something happened in Brussels this week, and unless you live inside policy or technology, you would not have seen it. There was no headline that carried the weight of it. But the consequences are already moving. The European Parliament voted to let a set of temporary powers expire. Powers that had allowed internet platforms to scan for child sexual abuse material. That phrase can slide past you if you let it. Do not let it. This is the legal permission to detect images and videos of real...

Three months. That is all it has taken for The Asutralian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant and her team to do what most governments have spent years talking about and never had the courage to actually pursue, to place some of the most powerful companies on earth on notice for something measurable, provable, and for too long, deliberately ignored. The evidence is being gathered. The cases are being built. Penalties of up to $49.5 million are on the table, and the Commissioner has made...

For the first time in human history, not in a generation, not in a decade, but right now, in real time, adults are not arriving ahead of children. They are arriving alongside them. Shaped by the same systems. Pulled by the same currents in architecture that was never designed to slow us down, never built to make us think, only to make us respond. The algorithms did not come for the young first. They came for all of us. What they have levelled is not just our attention. What they levelled was...