Table of Contents
Last week we remembered how the year 2024 made Elon Musk the most powerful man in the world. Today we look at some other important topics that will influence the online and offline worlds in 2025.
Technology takes a legal beating
Google: Google, declared an illegal monopoly in August, could be dissolved. The results are unknown, but what seemed impossible for a company valued at 2.5 trillion dollars is at stake. The United States has asked the judge in the case for a total disintegration of the giant, which would force it to get rid of Chrome, the most popular browser in the world and one of Google’s main businesses.
Tik Tok: The United States passed a law that, in less than three weeks, will force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell its popular video app or close it completely in the United States. Of the two possibilities, the more likely is a ban, as ByteDance has said divestment is impossible and Beijing has opposed a sale. As with Google, what seemed so implausible is now very possible: TikTok could truly be banned. Only the United States Supreme Court now stands between TikTok and its closure. If you had told me a year ago that TikTok would disappear at the same time we published a story cheekily titled How 2023 Became the Year Congress Forgot to Ban TikTok, I would have laughed. TikTok has become the center of American online culture, although perhaps Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts will fill its absence.
Social media companies also faced difficult legal hurdles in Australia. Continue reading the next section to learn more about it.
Should children have technology?
The double revolution of smartphones and social networks has reached the youngest. Now, as their guardians, we are tasked with setting boundaries for them. However, we still don’t know where those railings should be.
The hot debate about children and social media began in earnest in March, when psychologist and social scientist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation. Haidt attributes the current teen mental health crisis to social media and the loss of unstructured play time. The book shot to the top of the bestseller lists, where it remains; Haidt’s explanation has struck a chord. I think you are wrong; You can read why here.
U.S. schools have instituted policies banning smartphone use during the school day to varying degrees. The Los Angeles school district, the second largest in the United States, announced the phone ban in June. Parents defended themselves while also lamenting how much time their children spend on their phones. The United Kingdom, which has banned phones in schools across the country, looked on in bewilderment.
Australia took the most extreme measure in November when it banned any children under 16 from accessing social media, although the new law will only come into effect a year after trials of age restriction software in the country. Much is still unknown about the law – particularly how it will be applied – but it is the most restrictive in the world. Read more about it here.
The Guardian series on the role of social media in the exploitation and trafficking of children has been shortlisted for the Fetisov Journalism Prize for its outstanding contributions to civil rights.
You can read the first story in the series here: ‘If Instagram didn’t exist, it wouldn’t have happened’: a mother’s search for her trafficked daughter
Cryptocurrencies recover
Of all the tech niches, cryptocurrencies had the worst year in 2023. Sam Bankman-Fried’s multimillion-dollar fraud at FTX became global news, and the most famous man in cryptocurrencies became the mascot of his worst impulses when He was convicted of wire fraud and sentenced to 25 years. in prison. The United States then went after Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. That company admitted to money laundering, paid a fine and lost its CEO, Changpeng Zhao. Bitcoin ended the year at a price of approximately $42,000.
Then, like Elon Musk and AI, cryptocurrencies had a big time in 2024. Bitcoin skyrocketed to $100,000. Chalk that up to the close alliance between Donald Trump and the cryptocurrency industry. After all, he is the first US presidential candidate to accept cryptocurrency donations and has started his own cryptocurrency company. Polymarket and Kalshi, prediction betting markets based on blockchain technology, rose to prominence as a new and influential type of political poll. Polymarket’s CEO boasted that Trump had called him from Mar-a-Lago to talk about the site’s odds and praise it as more reliable than traditional polls, which continue to lose confidence.
Listen to our podcast about the Trump-crypto bromance here.
Read about the success of prediction betting markets like Polymarket and Kalshi and how they plan to capitalize on it in 2025.
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AI and its chips dominate the stock market
Nvidia, the maker of the most sought-after chips for programming artificial intelligence, is the biggest financial winner of 2024. Its share price has tripled since the beginning of the year. Consider the headlines The Guardian published in its earnings coverage:
November: Nvidia earnings: AI chip leader shows no signs of stopping gigantic growth
August: Nvidia takes advantage of big technology investment in AI to exceed the very high expectations of Wall Street. (There was a brief but precipitous drop in the share price in late August that was quickly erased.)
Can: Nvidia reports stratospheric growth as AI boom shows no signs of stopping
Google also reaped huge benefits from the financial AI frenzy. Even as it endured a flogging in the US courts, its stock value rose higher and higher with each announcement of each new AI artifact, more than doubling its stock price since the beginning of 2024. There were multiple versions of Gemini, Google’s flagship AI assistant capable of understanding images and words, as well as generating them. The model underpins Google’s AI-generated search result summaries, perhaps its most visible AI product. I would characterize investors’ reaction to Google’s announcements as follows: “An AI that summarizes your notes and turns them into a podcast? How nice! It’s hard to see finding a long-term use case. “There’s $50 billion in market capitalization here anyway.” Would AI podcasting software become a $50 billion company on its own? No, certainly not. But in Google’s hands, who knows? Google is also not known as a chip maker, but this month’s announcement that the company had developed an AI chip in-house with improved performance and lower power consumption sent its shares up 12%, a growth of $250 billion. of dollars for its market capitalization.
A number of other smaller companies have also benefited financially from the AI boom: OpenAI raised $6.5 billion this year; Reddit, the recipient of deals for its high-quality text data archive, debuted on the US stock market this year and saw its share price steadily rise to more than triple its initial price; Databricks, which provides software to store and analyze huge amounts of data, generated a $10 billion investment; Broadcom, which makes chips and software for data centers, was worth $1 trillion as of Dec. 13. Taiwan Semiconductor, an integral part of the AI supply chain, reached the same market capitalization milestone in October.
Arrest of Telegram CEO sparks change
The arrest of Pavel Durov in August put Telegram’s lax approach to content moderation in the spotlight. The founder and CEO of the app, which has almost a billion users, was arrested in France and charged with 12 counts, including “enabling criminal activities” on his app. French authorities accused him of complicity in the distribution of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, which he denies. His case is still pending as he remains on bail in France.
Before the arrest, Telegram was known for how little it policed what its users said and sent. It is now publishing reports on the effectiveness of its moderation. It announced it would crack down on harmful content such as fraud and terrorism in September, and this month announced that AI had allowed it to remove some 15 million groups and channels dedicated to illegal behavior. The change, although limited to one corner of the Internet, means that a billion people now talk to each other in a quite different landscape than before.