Every parent in Fishers who has watched a teenager vanish into a phone at the dinner table has a stake in what happened in a California courtroom last week. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle claims by state attorneys general that it designed its platforms to be addictive to children and harmful to their mental health. Indiana’s guaranteed share is $296 million, and it could reach $419 million. The changes Meta accepted — a two-hour daily default limit for users under 18, notifications silenced during school hours, and no access from midnight to 6 a.m. — will land on the phones of Hamilton Southeastern students, and on teenagers everywhere, within months.

I said on my latest Fridays With Larry podcast that this is a real milestone, and I still believe that. Attorney General Todd Rokita called it “a milestone victory for Hoosier families.” An industry that spent two decades escaping regulation just wrote an enormous check and accepted rules about how its product works.

But I would be doing readers a disservice if I stopped there. Some of the people who know this industry best are not celebrating.

Arturo Bejar, a former Meta engineer who testified against his old employer, put it bluntly: “The limitations that are in the agreement are the equivalent of saying: ‘Well, you can smoke as many cigarettes as you can in two hours a day.’ … It doesn’t make the cigarettes any safer.”

That criticism should stay with us. Two hours of a product engineered to be compulsive is still two hours of a product engineered to be compulsive.

Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute and a former senior adviser on artificial intelligence at the Federal Trade Commission, made a similar argument this week in a news interview.  She called the settlement significant and welcome, then noted that $17 billion spread across 10 years is, for a company spending at Meta’s scale on AI infrastructure, “a drop in the ocean.”

Her deeper concern is what the settlement does not touch. “We’re not really getting at the root cause of why do we have infinite scroll, or why are these platforms being architected in ways that are designed to addict teenagers,” Kak said. “And the answer is the business model.” That model — surveillance advertising, which pays out according to attention captured — remains fully intact. Treat the symptoms, she warned, and “we’re gonna be stuck playing whack-a-mole once the harms have already metastasized.”

Kak’s prescription is rules written in advance rather than fines collected afterward. “We cannot be relying on fines or certainly even on litigation after harms have already transpired,” she said. She argues the same lesson applies right now to artificial intelligence, before that industry builds its own decade of damage.

For Fishers, two things follow.

Watch the enforcement. The mother of a 16-year-old who died by suicide said outside the courthouse that the terms matter only “as long as they enforce it properly,” and that independent people need to verify it. A limit a determined teenager routes around on a laptop is a headline, not a safeguard.

Watch the money. Indiana’s share is meant to support youth mental health and crisis services. Hoosiers deserve to see where it lands, and whether any of it reaches HSE counselors and Hamilton County providers.

A settlement is not a safety standard. It is an admission, priced and scheduled. Parents in Fishers still have the hard part.