France wants to pull the plug. During his latest diplomatic pivot to New Delhi, Emmanuel Macron decided to play the role of the world’s digital headmaster, suggesting India should consider a flat ban on social media for anyone under the age of fifteen. It’s a bold pitch. It’s also a logistical fever dream.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi didn't bite on the ban, but he didn't exactly disagree either. Instead, he pivoted to the monster in the room: Artificial Intelligence. He wants AI to be "child-safe," a phrase that sounds comforting until you realize nobody actually knows how to code morality into a large language model.

It’s the classic regulatory dance. Two world leaders standing on a stage, pretending that a few lines of legislation can hold back the tide of a billion scrolling thumbs.

Macron’s "digital puberty" logic isn't new. Back in Paris, he’s been pushing for "digital carbon offsets" for the brain, trying to curb the dopamine loops that have turned Gen Z into a giant, twitchy focus group. But suggesting this to India is a different beast entirely. We aren't talking about a few million suburban kids in Lyon. We’re talking about a country where the internet is the primary—and often only—on-ramp to the modern economy. A ban isn't just a parental control setting here. It’s a gate.

The friction is in the enforcement. Imagine the "Age Verification" industry rubbing its hands together at the prospect of 400 million Indian teenagers needing to prove their birth date to access a meme. Who handles that data? A third-party contractor with a history of leaks? A government database that already feels too big to fail? The price of "safety" in this scenario is a total surrender of anonymity. To save the kids from TikTok, we have to track every single person on the internet from the moment they hit puberty. It’s a hell of a trade-off.

Modi’s stance on AI is equally slippery. "Child-safe AI" is the kind of buzz-phrase that keeps consultants in business for a decade. It implies there’s a version of GPT-5 that won't hallucinate, won't scrape private data, and won't show a ten-year-old how to bypass a school firewall. There isn't. The tech doesn't work that way. AI is a mirror; if the internet is a mess of toxicity and bias, the AI will be too. You can’t just put a "Disney" filter on a black-box algorithm and call it a day.

Silicon Valley, meanwhile, is watching this from across the pond with a mixture of boredom and terror. They know that if India—the world's largest open market for data—starts building walls, the growth charts go south. Meta and Google don't care about "digital puberty." They care about daily active users. If you prune the under-15 demographic, you aren't just losing kids; you're losing the next generation of data points. You're losing the people who train the very AI Modi wants to make "safe."

The reality of these high-level summits is usually a lot of smoke and very little fire. Macron gets to look like a protective visionary. Modi gets to look like a tech-savvy guardian. But the kids? They’re already three steps ahead. They’re using VPNs. They’re using decentralized apps that don’t show up in a government audit. They’re building their own corners of the web where the laws of France and India don't quite reach.

You can tell a fifteen-year-old they aren't allowed on Instagram, and they’ll find five other ways to waste their time and ruin their attention span. It’s what being fifteen is for. Governments trying to legislate that away feel like parents trying to stop the rain with a leaky umbrella. It looks busy, but everyone still gets soaked.

The real question isn't whether a ban is a good idea. It’s whether the people proposing it have ever actually used the platforms they’re trying to scrub clean. Or if they just like the sound of their own voices in a room full of cameras.

How do you ban a ghost? Or better yet, how do you regulate a shadow that’s already moved across the wall before you even turned on the light?