Ralph Nader moment for the information highway: We need ‘seat belts’ and ‘air bags’ for digital platform safety

In Indian boardrooms, ‘AI-enabled’ could overtake ‘digital transformation’ in its buzz quotient. If it’s new, app-based and comes with a valuation expressible in unicorns, it must be good, right? Well, India has always had a muscular pro-innovation bias. From UPI to ONDC, from Aadhaar to account aggregators, it has shown the world that technology can leapfrog infrastructure.

But history reminds us that progress occasionally has unintended consequences. The byproduct of a genuinely useful innovation can be harmful. Worse still, creators of successful digital technologies tend to gain an outsized influence over social behaviour.

If a business’s market cap rivals a state budget, it can subtly script culture.In 1965, in the US, a young lawyer named Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, accusing automakers of prioritizing style and profits over passenger safety. The outrage that followed led to what became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Seat-belts, air-bags and crash standards became industry norms and death rates dropped.

Even those allergic to regulation grudgingly admitted that not flying through a windshield was a net positive for shareholder value. Fast-forward to 2026. Replace tailfins with touchscreens, horsepower with engagement metrics, crash fatalities with spiraling teen anxiety.

We may well be at an ‘unsafe at any age’ moment for social media and tech platforms. In Los Angeles, major addiction trials have begun, with over 1,600 plaintiffs alleging that social-media firms deliberately engineered addictive features that expose children to harm. The legal strategy is clever.