28 August 2026

Welcome

Meta choosing to cave in and pay US states US$18 billion or so has ramifications that are still being understood. Obviously I’m leading with that this week, but there’s a lot more that’s still to understand — including why it may be a tactical loss for Meta but very much a strategic win.

After all, the money is to be paid out across the next decade, which amounts to less than a 1% hit on the company’s annual revenue of more than US$200 billion.

Datacentres continue to be in the news too, of course, but as usual there’s much more.

Meta settles for US$18 billion but now gets to make the rules others must follow

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has agreed to pay up to US$18 billion to settle the US case on child safety that we mentioned last week.

According to Meta’s official statement, the agreement includes “strict daily time limits teens can’t turn off, default blocks from our apps at night, muted notifications during school hours, and new controls for parents”.

Teens will also be able to “choose a non-algorithmic feed” and turn off autoplay, and by default teens won’t be able to see the number of likes and reactions on posts. Teens will also be blocked from using “cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters”.

Meta is now calling on TikTok and YouTube to “join us in supporting teens”, an interesting way to spin yourself as a leader after what was effectively losing the case.

Meta now gets to set rules that others can’t afford to follow

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick’s headline makes an important point: “Meta just paid nearly $17 billion to make sure it gets to write the kid safety rules for every other social media platform.” His lengthy analysis also explains why different news outlets are reporting different numbers of dollars.

“Given some of the recent court decisions, it’s no surprise that Meta would strike some sort of settlement. As these cases continued, the headlines would only get worse for the company. And Meta deserves some bad headlines, but as I’ve discussed, many of the bad headlines in these cases involved lawyers and the media taking things way out of context. The classic case with Meta is that many of its efforts to study how to make its platforms safer were used against the company as proof that ‘they knew!’ their platforms were unsafe!,” Masnick wrote.

“The lesson for the rest of the tech industry is grim and unambiguous: never study whether your own platform is causing harm. The mere existence of the research will be turned into Exhibit A that ‘they knew’, both in the court of public opinion and in actual courts,” he said.

“The other bit of background worth understanding here is that Meta has been desperately seeking a path to regulatory capture for quite some time now. It’s been practically begging for Congress to pass child safety legislation that only the largest companies (like itself) could comply with.”

Of course there’s no guarantee this settlement will benefit Australians. We have our own rules.

There’s a bunch of local expert reaction at Scimex.

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Datacentre energy rules not as first reported

Despite some of the reporting earlier this week, Queensland and the Northern Territory did not get special rules for powering their new datacentres in this week’s National Cabinet meeting.

“Initially, the government said it would require new data centres to rely on renewables, backed up by batteries and gas. However, this has changed. Its new standards, set to be legislated in early 2027, leave room for some jurisdictions to use fossil fuels instead. Queensland and the Northern Territory have welcomed this shift,” The Conversation reported, for example.

“The new standards grant carve-outs for Queensland and the Northern Territory to use coal and gas. Queensland argues its publicly owned electricity system allows it to manage any cost or supply issues. The NT argues it should be free to use local gas, given it lies outside the National Electricity Market [NEM], which is largely limited to the eastern states.”

But no. Or at least not quite, according to energy and climate change minister Chris Bowen.

“We are legislating nationally consistent standards across the board with no exceptions and no carve-outs," Bowen told the ABC on Friday.

“The only change is that where a state-owned government electricity company asserts that they can do it cheaper than renewables, they can apply to the Commonwealth to do that.”

So, as the ABC puts it, the Commonwealth gets to decide whether states can use coal or gas as a main power source, and they’d have to prove it was “cheaper and better for the grid than renewables would be”.

Australian datacentre power needs to grow 700% by 2036

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) predicts a seven-fold increase in electricity consumption by datacentres over the next decade.

“Today, there are around 165 data centres that consumed approximately 5 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity in financial year (FY) 2026, equivalent to around 3% of total NEM operational electricity consumption,” says their latest forecast report (PDF).

By FY36, datacentres will consume around 13% of Australia’s NEM electricity, AEMO predicts.

In NSW alone, Anthropic is interested in building up to 5 gigawatts of AI datacentre capacity, which would be three times the size of Australia’s entire existing datacentre infrastructure.

Meanwhile in Tasmania, George Town council has approved a 288MW AI facility on the former Gunns Pulp Mill site despite local opposition.

Australia may now see a rush of datacentre construction in an attempt to get in before the rules are legislated.

“DATA CENTRES” OR “DATACENTRES”? Your writer currently prefers “datacentres”, but leaves it as “data centres” in direct quotes of other people’s writing. Do you have a preference?

A few notes from TechLeaders 2026

Last weekend I had the great pleasure of being in Bowral for the TechLeaders 2026 conference. I took plenty of notes, and I’m going to digest the many interesting comments about AI and such for an extra newsletter in the coming week.

For now, here’s a couple stories I’ve noticed from there.

• From B&T, “Liberal MP Aaron Violi has accused prime minister Anthony Albanese of a ‘profound failure of leadership’ over his decision to pursue a national artificial intelligence regulatory framework despite not personally using AI tools... Violi said he and opposition leader Angus Taylor were regular AI users.”

• Professor Toby Walsh, chief scientist of the NSW AI Institute, reckons we’ve got the AI boom wrong ($) by concentrating on huge, expensive models. We’re building Ferraris when we need a fleet of Fiats, he said.

Also in the news this week

• The Greens, with support of independents, will be looking to ban the import of smart glasses when Parliament resumes.

• The NSW government’s new rules to address problem gambling include mandatory biometric face ID cameras at the doors of gaming rooms, linked to a statewide exclusion register. Problem gamblers can sign up for themselves, but as Biometric Update reports, “The system also accounts for third-party exclusions by concerned family members and friends when there is a significant risk of gambling harm. Police will also be able to initiate third-party exclusions where there are risks related to money laundering or the use of proceeds of crime”.

• Songs created mostly or entirely by AI will be excluded from Australia’s music charts. “However, AI-assisted recordings can still chart if they are substantially human-made,” reports ABC News.

• The Australian Federal Police arrested two Perth men who are alleged to be “principal participants” in the TeamPCP cybercrime gang.

• Dating site eharmony misled customers about their membership charges, says the Federal Court. The problems included offering “free dating” even though consumers could not engage in ongoing communication with other people for free, and describing something as a one-month membership when the minimum sign-up period was six months. Wikipedia lists the company’s numerous previous problems.

• A Senate committee inquiry has looked at the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026, the one which gives more powers to the eSafety Commissioner. Despite some widely different views, the committee’s report recommends that the bill be passed as-is.

• It’s from earlier this month, but ANU’s National Security College has a new paper on the resilience of Australia’s submarine cables.

LATEST PODCAST: BRITISH POLITICS AND MORE! The weird goings-on in British politics were a focus of my more recent podcast episode, The 9pm Clacton and On and On with David F Porteous, Scottish author and social researcher. We also discuss Barnaby Joyce’s claim that One Nation is “one of the gayest parties in Australia”, the early days of social media, maths, physics, shrinkflation, and more. Look for The 9pm Edict in your podcast app.

Elsewhere

• TikTok reached a US$400 million settlement (New York Times gift link) with the US Justice Department over accusations that it was illegally gathering children’s information.

• It looks like New Zealand will be getting its own teen social media ban.

• Operation Bluebird is a startup in Virginia which wants to launch a new Twitter, saying Elon Musk has given up the name. But before you get too excited, as Ars Technica reports, “A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based ‘veracity engine for real-time analysis’ (‘Vera’ for short), which runs on every tweet,’ so yeah, a robot will be deciding what you can and can’t say. My guess is that X Corp will start a trademark fight, because...

• X has sent a cease-and-desist order to Nitter, described by TechCrunch as “an open source project that allowed people to read X posts without logging into or even opening the X app”.

• The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is concerned that age assurance done at the service-provider level will fail and leave youth less safe on the internet. Age assurance should happen on users’ devices, they say.

• In India and elsewhere, workers are performing tasks while wearing head cameras to show AI robots how it’s done (New York Times gift link).

• A paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that we need ongoing monitoring of AI and political information.

Inquiries of note

Nothing new for us this week.

What’s next?

Parliament is currently on a break until Monday 7 September, which is 10 days away, when it returns for two weeks of sittings.

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