The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part IX — When the Reckoning Reaches the Courts
Part VIII questioned whether regulation alone can alter the balance of power between Big Tech and society. Part IX asks what happens when accountability moves beyond legislation and into the courts and users themselves begin to demand answers.

There is a revealing assumption embedded in much of the debate about Big Tech: that the companies will eventually reform because political pressure, public criticism, and increasingly sophisticated regulation will persuade them to do so. Perhaps. But history suggests a less charitable and probably more realistic explanation for corporate change.

Powerful companies rarely abandon profitable business models because they have suddenly concluded that those models are incompatible with the public interest. They do so when the legal, financial or reputational costs of maintaining them become impossible to ignore. The tobacco industry did not transform because it discovered the importance of public health. Financial institutions did not fundamentally rethink their practices because criticism alone persuaded them that markets required greater responsibility. In industry after industry, public pressure mattered enormously, but the decisive moment often arrived when pressure acquired legal consequences.

That may be where Big Tech is now heading. For years, the debate surrounding the platforms was framed primarily as a regulatory problem. Were governments moving fast enough? Were legislators sufficiently technologically literate? Should companies be treated as publishers, utilities, common carriers, or something else entirely? What new obligations should be imposed upon recommendation systems, advertising models, app stores, artificial intelligence or the collection of personal data?

Those questions remain important. But there is another question beginning to emerge beneath them: what happens when users stop waiting for governments to solve the problem and begin asking courts whether the companies themselves can be held accountable?

This changes the nature of the debate. Legislation generally operates prospectively. It tells companies what they must do in the future. Courts can also look backwards. They ask what happened, who knew, what could reasonably have been anticipated and whether an organization’s choices contributed to a particular harm. That is a much more uncomfortable form of accountability.

A company can lobby against a bill. It can seek changes to legislation before it is passed. It can influence regulatory guidance and negotiate implementation. None of this guarantees success, but large corporations have spent decades developing the institutional machinery required to participate effectively in the political process.

Courts are different. Once a legal dispute has reached the question of responsibility, the argument is no longer only about what policymakers might require in the abstract. It becomes a question about evidence. Internal documents. Design decisions. Warnings. Risk assessments. Corporate knowledge. The relationship between what a company knew and what it chose to do.

The burden of explanation begins to shift. For the platforms, that shift may prove more consequential than another round of hearings in Washington or Brussels. The first major test of this new pressure may be child safety and there are obvious reasons why.

Few questions are as politically powerful as the safety of children. Abstract arguments about freedom of expression, innovation, and technological progress become considerably more difficult when confronted with evidence that children may be exposed to foreseeable and preventable harm. The question changes from whether a platform is generally beneficial to society to whether a company knew that particular features, systems or incentives created specific risks for vulnerable users and failed to take reasonable action.

That is not merely a regulatory question; it is a question of responsibility. And it may become the point at which the existing model of platform governance begins to change.

Yet child safety cannot be the end of the story. Indeed, it would be a mistake to treat children as the only people whose relationship with digital platforms deserves meaningful protection. Children may provide the clearest and most politically compelling case, but the deeper principle is broader. Adults also deserve protection from business models designed around asymmetries of information and power. Users also have interests in privacy, autonomy, and agency. Citizens also have interests in digital environments that do not systematically exploit vulnerabilities merely because those vulnerabilities can be measured and monetized. Communities also have interests in systems that do not treat social cohesion as collateral damage in the pursuit of engagement. And society as a whole has an interest in ensuring that the companies which increasingly mediate its public life cannot simply define responsibility according to the limits of what legislation has explicitly prohibited.

This is the larger reckoning. The argument is not that technology companies are uniquely evil; nor is it that every social problem produced online can be traced to corporate malice. That is neither accurate nor particularly useful.

The platforms built extraordinary technologies. They solved real problems. They connected people across distances that previous generations could barely imagine. Their success was deserved, at least in part, because they made the internet more accessible, more useful, and more powerful.

The question is what happens when the institutions that produced those achievements become sufficiently powerful that their own understanding of responsibility becomes one of the principal constraints on their power. For too long, the answer has been: very little. Platforms investigated themselves. Companies commissioned their own research. Executives appeared before legislatures. Regulators announced new inquiries. Governments threatened action. And the underlying model continued largely unchanged.

This is why the current moment may be different. The reckoning will not come because Big Tech has suddenly come to Jesus. It will not come because the companies have collectively discovered that human flourishing is a better objective than engagement. Nor will it come simply because legislators have finally written sufficiently strict rules, although legislation can and should play a crucial role in establishing the boundaries within which digital power operates.

The more profound change will come when Big Tech no longer controls the terms of the conversation about the harms it creates. That is what users and courts can do. Users can withdraw the legitimacy that platforms have long assumed their scale provides. They can demand alternatives, organize and bring claims. They can transform the experience of harm from an abstract policy problem into a question of accountability.

Courts, in the meantime, can ask questions that corporate public relations and political lobbying are designed to avoid. What did the company know? When did it know it? What did it do with that knowledge? Were risks foreseeable? Were warnings ignored? Was a particular outcome simply an unfortunate consequence of innovation, or was it connected to choices that could reasonably have been made differently?

These questions are more difficult to absorb into a compliance department. They may also prove more difficult to solve through lobbying.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

Filed Under: big tech, child safety, litigation, metric not mission, open internet, reckoning, regulations