YouTube on Tuesday announced it’s beginning to roll out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience. The company says it will use a variety of signals to determine the users’ possible age, regardless of what the user entered as their birthday when they signed up for an account.

When YouTube identifies a user as a teen, it introduces new protections and experiences, which include disabling personalized advertising, safeguards that limit repetitive viewing of certain types of content, and enabling digital well-being tools such as screen time and bedtime reminders, among others.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

Long before "agentic AI," we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That's why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a "user agent." Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our "agents" that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers:

https://privacybadger.org/

Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It's the same force that means you can put anyone's gas in your gas-tank, or anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone's milk on your cereal.

But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's "dish partners"? What if your toaster refused to toast "unauthorized bread"?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

It's hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition's, you'd buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival's dishes is if the manufacturer's own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made.

But once a company owns the market – once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers – they could cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it.

That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of. Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases:

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/google-loses-the-adtech-monopolization

This thrice-convicted monopolist bribed Apple – more than $20b/year – to stay out of the search market:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/how-do-you-solve-problem-google-search-courts-must-enable-competition-while

They cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

They cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google

Google wasn't always this way. The "don't be evil" company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open field, where any web server could talk to any "user agent," even one whose user was a startup like Google, that was making a copy of every page on the server.

Mayyybe this is a good time to consider that the entire infrastructure of modern life shouldn't depend on like 5 companies?

It’s a very stupid concept that comes from liberals and social democrats considering capitalism not Bad enough as a descriptor and wanting a label that’s pejorative enough and implies that corporations are forcing a regression from some arbitrary idea of progress.

The concept of feudalism is already suspect and generalizes from the compromise regime established in England after the Norman Conquest, and the concept of technofeudalism is even more tenuous because the claim just rests on monopoly power (with revenue sought via rent and interest) playing a major part in the current economy.

But that’s perfectly compatible with the capitalist mode of production and even makes complete sense as an outgrowth of the current regime of capital accumulation. Since the turn to neoliberalism around the 1970s there’s been a lot of emphasis on real estate as both a secure investment (an idea originating from the early 20th century) and also as a good basis for speculative investment.

This took off after 2008 when banks and real estate cartels managed to buy up a lot of properties and housing began to be fully incorporated into a new logic of accumulation that was pretty decoupled from its actual use for living. This paired with the importance of debt to modern capitalism, which is even built into the current form of money, which functions more or less as a promissory note for future new values. Debt is important for facilitating a large scale of production without immediate guarantees of physical products, or in other words for the liquidity of capital when the scale of general capital accumulation has rapidly outpaced the scale of individual capitals.

For capitalists this usually appears as the dependency on speculative investments that depend on the successes of the individual operations and the economy as a whole, for the rest of us who don’t own shit this usually appears as credit card debt and the cost of basic things like housing having little to no relation to the actual incomes of the “consumers.”

Capitalists want total security for their investments to ensure the future value will make good on their speculations, so they implement disciplinary measures that are meant to ensure that workers accept their shitty lot and have no alternatives (the insane automated and gamified discipline of Amazon factories is a great example). From our perspective as workers this looks like a reduction of our free labor (free to sell to any capitalist) into a labor that already has an obligated claim on it to a specific capitalist.

With these combined economizing and disciplinary techniques, you get the return of company towns, insanely bold landlord behavior, and generally speaking very pervasive control of capitalists over intimate aspects of our lives that were formerly considered only the concern of the state and private citizens. Much of the attention on this has focused on the manipulation of politics through super PACs or the cultural strategies of neoreactionary Silicon Valley capitalists like Peter Thiel.

All of this taken together creates the illusion of a new landed aristocracy demanding tribute from serfs or indentured servants. But it’s perfectly in line with the logic of capitalist production and it’s a specific political strategy for the current regime of capital accumulation. The liberals’ focus on the individual Silicon Valley capitalists and their manipulation of specific politicians is very superficial and is based on a crude populism that doesn’t do anything but, at best, convince people to vote for more sheepdogging politicians who bring them back into the Democratic Party or some social democratic garbage if they live outside the U.S.

But the only appropriate response to class struggle from the side of capital is for workers to get their shit together and respond with their own class struggle as a proletariat. That means not just playing by the rules by bending them and, where possible, turning them into weapons of workers against capitalists. That’s the difference between what the rent regulations are now versus what they might be in the context of class struggle.

Mr Robot, 2015