A Los Angeles jury ruled that YouTube got kids hooked on dopamine slots disguised as unboxing videos. Meta got hit too. The trial ended in March. We're hearing about the settlement now because legal proceedings move at the speed of a pension fund rebalancing.
Google argued that children freely chose to watch Minecraft speedruns for eleven hours straight. The jury disagreed. Turns out designing an algorithm that serves up infinite content to underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes counts as negligence. Wild that needed a trial.
The settlement amount remains undisclosed. Google will pay some number that sounds large to normal humans but registers as a rounding error in Alphabet's quarterly filing. They'll add a parental control feature nobody enables. Problem solved.
Parents who let their seven-year-old have unsupervised internet access will continue to do exactly that. Little Timmy will keep watching someone else play video games instead of playing video games himself. The cycle continues unbroken.
Retail traders saw the headline and wondered if they should short GOOGL. They will not short GOOGL. They will instead buy call options expiring in three days because someone on Reddit said the settlement was "priced in." It was priced in. It was priced in before the trial started.
Google's stock moved zero point two percent on the news. The market does not care. The market has never cared. YouTube could be declared a Superfund site and GOOGL would still close green because cloud revenue beat expectations.
The real victims here are the children whose attention spans now measure in TikTok units. But the second-place victims are the dipsh*ts who think this headline means anything for their portfolio.
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
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