#110 The Age of Responsibility: Australia’s Stricter Social Media Rules for Minors
Today, in her debut piece for Technopolitik, Shobhankita Reddy writes on Australia’s social media regulation bill. Avinash Shet follows, with a piece on the future of Air Taxis in India. Lastly, Lokendra Sharma explores supply chain warfare in conjunction with technology and trade in this weeks curated section,
Technology has become important not just in our everyday lives, but has also become an arena for contestation among major powers including India. The Takshashila Institution has designed the 'Technopolitik: A Technology Geopolitics Survey' to understand and assess what people think about how India should navigate high-tech geopolitics. We are sure you are going to love the questions! Please take this 5-minute survey at the following link: https://bit.ly/technopolitik_survey
Technopolitik: Disconnecting the Youth: Australia’s Social Media Bill
— Shobhankita Reddy
Last week, Australia approved a bill to restrict social media use for children under the age of 16. This is not a blanket ban—messaging apps, online gaming services, and platforms primarily used for health and education purposes are exempted. The bill also only prevents access to information available in a “logged in” state and aims to check addictive features such as algorithmic-tailored content, infinite scrolling, notifications, etc. However, no exceptions are made for age-restricted users who may have the consent of their parents or caregivers.
While it’s still unclear how this law will be enforced, it places the onus on social media platforms to take “reasonable” steps to prevent minors under 16 from creating accounts. Post a 12-month transition period to allow platforms to develop and implement the processes and controls to comply, penalties for non-compliance can reach up to AUD 50 million for serious breaches. In the interest of data privacy, the law also encourages alternative means of age verification that do not require a government-owned ID card.
Importantly, no punishments exist for children who break the law or their parents.
While many countries have attempted to regulate children's access to social media, Australia's recent legislation establishes the highest age limit imposed by any nation. It is also the most stringent in terms of holding platforms accountable for their negative impact on youth. The regulation reflects a mainstream sentiment regarding the risks associated with social media use, such as anxiety, depression, and loneliness, which are exacerbated for children during their formative years.
It’s difficult to see how this regulation may play out. Simple workarounds like VPN access mean that it is beyond the state’s capacity to meaningfully check children’s’ activity online. Would increasing barriers for children to access regulated social media content lead them to seek out more unregulated corners of the internet that could pose greater dangers? What positive effects of social media will children be made to give up on? Could alternatives that place the responsibility of children’s’ digital activity on the parent (vs the platform provider) be considered? A combination of parental control and oversight, and limiting children’s’ screen time by forced logouts, for example?
Nonetheless, this bill adds to the increasing array of regulatory challenges and scrutiny that social media platforms face worldwide—from issues related to data collection, transparency, and privacy to misinformation during election campaigns and content moderation biases. If this legislation encourages platforms to improve their self-regulation and prompts civil society to advocate for the health, developmental needs, and online safety of children, it will have fulfilled its objectives.
Technopolitik: Sky High Hopes: Air Taxis and the Future of Urban Mobility in India
— Avinash Shet
In the autumn of this year, the news broke out on the collaboration between the upcoming electrically powered Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) company Sarla Aviation and Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru. Even though the operation would take two to three years, the tie-up opened up the conversation on the future of mobility, especially urban mobility.
With the image of being India's traffic capital, Bangalore will look forward to reaping the benefits of eVTOLS. These electrically powered aircraft will soon emerge from futuristic movies into reality as Air Taxis. The question is how mature the technology is and whether the nation is ready to embrace its diffusion into society.
The development of flying cars started over a decade ago, as battery and drone technologies developed. Joby Aviation in the US and Volocopter and Lilium in Europe are at the forefront of developing the air taxi. They have achieved many milestones, including successful test flights and pre-certification processes. Volocopter passed the public testing in cities like Dubai and Singapore almost 5 years ago. Just this week, on the 3rd of December, Joby Aviation eVTOL was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a certification and regulatory body for aviation in the USA. They have already started making vertiports in Dubai, and air taxis will be operational from late next year.
We are at the inflexion point. From next year onwards, we will see air taxis flying in major cities like Los Angeles, Singapore, Dubai, and London.
India has started a bit late on this journey, but many players are emerging, such as the ePlane company and Sarla Aviation, which are determined to develop the eVTOL by 2026. Indigo plans to tap into this technology and operate an eVTOL fleet procured from Archer Aviation, a US-based company.
Private entities in India and worldwide are developing technology and products for air taxis. Is the state catching up with them? Even after the development of air taxi technology, the next challenges lie in the certification of such aircraft, regulation in building ports, and regulation in pilot training. The regulator body has to develop a unique set of regulations for air taxis as eVTOLs are different from conventional aircraft. FAA started drafting regulatory frameworks in August 2022 and has joined the National Aviation Authorities Network, which consists of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and signed declarations of cooperation with Japan and South Korea on integrating and certifying AAM (Advance Air Mobility) aircraft. Similarly, in Europe, the European Commission has adopted a regulatory package, giving the go-ahead for VTOL operations and air taxis in April this year.
These regulations are vital to ensure safe urban air mobility, setting a global benchmark for countries like India. India’s certification and regulatory body for commercial aviation, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), has yet to formalise a comprehensive framework for air taxis. DGCA is preparing the groundwork for the planned launch of air taxis by 2026. On September 6th, they issued rules for establishing the vertiports. Only the future indicates the success of these efforts.
São Paulo, one of the world’s most populous cities with over 12 million residents, is notorious for its severe traffic congestion. It offers a compelling example of how air-based urban mobility can succeed. With one of the largest helicopter fleets operating as air taxis, the city demonstrates the potential of vertical transportation in addressing urban congestion. The lessons from Sao Paulo emphasise the importance of infrastructure, public trust, affordability, and regulatory framework, which could guide India’s adoption strategy.
Sarla Aerospace’s initiative in Bangalore could begin a new era for India’s urban transportation. As global air taxi services mature and regulatory frameworks evolve, India must seize the opportunity to lead. Learning from international success stories and addressing local challenges will be crucial. With proactive measures from the DGCA and robust infrastructure planning, air taxis could become a viable and transformative solution for India’s urban mobility challenges.
If you like the newsletter, you will love to read our in-depth research and analysis at https://takshashila.org.in/high-tech-geopolitics.
Critical Minerals, Critical Moves: The Frontlines of Supply Chain Warfare
— Lokendra Sharma
President-elect Trump is yet to assume office but the US-China trade war is already heating up. More specifically, both sides are engaging in what is being termed as supply chain warfare. On 3 December, China announced that it would ban the export of critical minerals such as gallium, germanium and antimony — used for making semiconductors as well as weapons — to the US. While fundamentally a measure that restricts trade, it can also be described as supply chain warfare because the logic of restrictive measure is not protectionism but denying one’s adversary a key supply chain component for hardware used in both the civilian tech sector as well as the military one. It is also, therefore, an example of a tech war. China’s actions came barely a day after the US announced further restricting China’s access to semiconductor tech.
According to US Geological Survey data represented in graphical form by a recent DW report, US sources 63, 26 and 21 per cent of its Antimony, Germanium and Gallium, respectively, from China. Given this crucial dependence on China, there is bound to be a short-term impact at least on the US. The first impact would, however, be a further increase in global prices for these critical minerals. China had tightened export of critical minerals last year, and the risks emanating out of China’s dominance of the critical minerals supply chain is well-known for the last many years not just in the US but elsewhere as well. This means that the US may have prepared for the eventuality of China banning exports of critical minerals — but whether this plan (if any) would work would have to be seen.
That said, the US-China tussle is just one (major) factor impacting the supply chains. There are other powers of both declining and aspiring nature that are also indulging in re-configuring their supply chains. Major power or not, at the core of these developments is geopolitics impacting supply chains. But how does this unfold? Bednarski et al., in their 2023 paper, ask a similar question: ‘How do geopolitical disruptions affect the configuration, flow, and management of global supply chains?’
Bednarski, L., Roscoe, S., Blome, C., & Schleper, M. C. (2023). Geopolitical disruptions in global supply chains: a state-of-the-art literature review. Production Planning & Control, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537287.2023.2286283 (open access)
After following a thorough methodology, the authors select a list of 50 research articles on supply chains from more than a thousand articles yielded in an initial search. Based on analysing these 50 articles, their primary finding is that supply chain disruptions can be mitigated in two ways. First, by redesigning existing supply chains through regionalisation and back-shoring. The literature analysed also calls for (without giving adequate attention to the costs involved)moving away from just-in-time supply chains.
Second, to enhance transparency, they employ technologies such as blockchain, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence. In terms of further avenues for research, they find that research on geopolitical factors causing disruptions is more forced on the manufacturing sector, while the same is lacking for the service sector. The highlight of the paper, however, is an intricate but insightful concept mapping framework that they prepared based on the literature.
What We're Reading (or Listening to)
[Policy Paper] Three Political Reforms of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army under Xi Jinping: An Explanation, By Anushka Saxena
[Feature] Who are India’s strategic affairs thinkers of the next decade? ThePrint Intellectuals List, By ThePrint Team
[Takshashila Blog] A Silicon Curtain: Examining the Implications of US Export Controls on Chips, by Ashwin Prasad and Amit Kumar