“Meta wouldn’t settle unless it sees the writing on the wall and feels really exposed,” Nora Freeman Engstrom, a Stanford University law professor, told the New York Times.

“I think it’s a genuinely important settlement, but the $17 billion headline is probably the least interesting part of it,” Stanford’s Engstrom told me by email. “What matters more is that Meta has accepted enforceable constraints on the design of its products—and that the states have produced a regulatory template they can now take to the rest of the industry.”

The settlement doesn’t directly apply to YouTube, TikTok, or any other platform, but it does give litigants a blueprint for how to pressure those platforms using a similar playbook. “States now have a negotiated menu of age assurance, time limits, nighttime restrictions, parental controls, auditing, and monetary relief that they can put on the table,” Engstrom told me.

“Meta plainly did not want to be the only platform competing with one hand tied behind its back,” Engstrom said. But it may also end up making Meta an unlikely ally in the broader push to regulate the industry.