Social media bans are old news—now the U.K. is considering banning phone sales to kids under 16

Now the country may take an even more drastic step.

According to multiple outlets, government ministers are seriously considering banning the sale of mobile phones to children under 16. This, in a country where 97% of kids own a phone by the age of 12.

There are reportedly a bunch of motivations behind this, such as the prevalence of social-media bullying, exposure to pornography, and violent content. The most prominent campaigner for a ban has been Esther Ghey, who believes the teenage murderers of her daughter Brianna were partly inspired by seeing violent material online.

After the British government in February gave schools guidance on how to institute phone bans, the influential charity Parentkind commissioned a poll that showed 58% of parents would support a ban on smartphones for under-16s—though breaking this down, the parents of 5- to 11-year-olds were much likelier than those of 11- to 16-year-olds to back such a move. A February poll by research outfit More in Common found 64% of parents supported such a ban. Lawmaker Miriam Cates, from the governing Conservative Party, has also openly called for a ban to protect children’s mental health.

But will the ban actually happen? There are certainly a few reasons to suspect not.

Firstly, many of the problems that a ban would supposedly fix have already been theoretically addressed in the Online Safety Act, which was passed less than a year ago. Secondly, many British Conservatives do not like the idea of getting too involved in parental decisions. As one unnamed government source told the Guardian: “It’s not the government’s role to step in and microparent; we’re meant to make parents more aware of the powers they have like restrictions on websites, apps, and even the use of parental control apps.”

Also, nothing would stop parents from buying devices for their offspring; even Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has given his young daughters phones.

So this is far from a done deal, but if the ban were to become a reality, it would be a seminal moment in the growing movement to shield kids from the worst of online life. Banning kids from accessing social media—as many U.S. states have legislated to do—is one thing, as is controlling usage within the school environment. But saying kids can’t buy what are essentially general-purpose computers would be quite a different matter.

More news below. And do check out Fortune’s most recent Leadership Next podcast, which features Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost discussing AI’s impact on housing supply and the creative industries, among other things. It’s available on Apple and Spotify.

David Meyer

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NEWSWORTHY

AI copyright bill. A new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives would force AI companies to give a full list of all the copyrighted works used in the training of their models. It was introduced yesterday by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and it would apply to both new and existing models, Billboard reports. There would be fines for noncompliance. All this goes further than the EU’s incoming AI Act, which only demands summaries of copyrighted training material. (Bonus read: this Washington Post piece on OpenAI’s mounting legal difficulties, including lawsuits over the use of copyrighted material in model training.)

“Reasoning” models. OpenAI will soon release GPT-5 and Meta’s Llama 3 is about to roll out, and both new AI models come with promises of bringing us closer to the dawn of artificial general intelligence, the Financial Times reports. OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap: “We’re going to start to see AI that can take on more complex tasks in a more sophisticated way.” Meta AI research chief Joelle Pineau: “We are hard at work in figuring out how to get these models not just to talk, but actually to reason, to plan…to have memory.”

Automattic buys Beeper. Automattic, which is best known as the company behind WordPress, has bought Beeper, a messaging outfit that recently tried to offer iMessage interoperability to Android users, only to be defeated by Apple. As Wired notes, this episode forms part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Apple. The publication also puts a $125 million price tag on the acquisition, the financial terms of which were not formally announced.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

60%

—The increase in ByteDance’s profit last year, according to Bloomberg, which attributes the rise to the success of TikTok Shop and notes that the TikTok parent’s (unaudited) revenue and profit seem to have overtaken those of arch-rival Tencent.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Europe’s landmark climate change ruling may force companies to reduce ’emissions as quickly as you can’, by Peter Vanham and Nicholas Gordon

All aboard the Nvidia ‘rocket ship’: Executives are raking in company stock awards despite missing out on their bonuses for 2023, by Amanda Gerut

Amazon’s security chief says he would be ‘astonished’ if cybersecurity professionals are laid off due to AI, by Rachyl Jones

Google finally launches a ‘find my device’ feature, by Chris Morris

Apple joins tech exodus to Florida— iPhone maker plans a 45,000 square foot office near Miami, by Bloomberg

I lead one of the startups accusing Apple of patent infringement. Here’s why Congress should side with us, by Priya Abani (Commentary)

BEFORE YOU GO

AI’s energy use. Arm CEO Rene Haas has made an alarming new prediction about AI’s rapidly increasing energy demands: that AI data centers could by 2030 account for over 20% of U.S. energy usage, up from 4% or less today. “That’s hardly very sustainable,” Haas said, according to the Wall Street Journal. (Of course, Arm, a leading chip architecture firm, is in a position to do something about AI's power requirements.) Meanwhile, The Register reports that growing restrictions on energy usage may already be hitting Amazon Web Services’ Irish operations, with the company reportedly redirecting some customers with power-hungry workloads to its data centers elsewhere in the EU.