ninety hours

A judge in New Mexico has decided how many hours per month a teenager should spend on Instagram.

Ninety. That is the number. Not a recommendation from a pediatrician, not a guideline from a school board, not a suggestion in a parenting book. A court order. Ninety hours per month across Facebook and Instagram, imposed on Meta as a condition of harm abatement.

Bryan Biedscheid, a state court judge, branded Meta a public nuisance and ordered $567 million into a harm abatement fund. This comes on top of $375 million in civil penalties — a jury found 75,000 violations of the Unfair Practices Act. The total lands somewhere around $942 million, which sounds enormous until you remember what Meta pulls in annually. The fine is a rounding error. Less than a week of revenue.

The money is not the story.

The story is that a judge is now doing product design.

The court ordered Meta to pause push notifications between 10 PM and 7 AM daily. During the academic year — weekdays only — notifications go dark again from 8 AM to 3 PM. Like counts must be hidden for users under eighteen. And the cap: ninety hours per month, enforced at the platform level.

Read that list again. Those are not legal principles. Those are product specifications. A notification schedule. A UI change to hide a specific metric. A usage ceiling denominated in hours. This is a court order that reads like a product requirements document.

New Mexico’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez, filed the case in December 2023. Two and a half years later, a judge is telling one of the largest companies on earth when it can send a push notification to a child.

The mechanisms here are distinct from what happened with Google and the DMA. Antitrust remedies aim at market structure — who competes, how products interoperate, where data flows. Nuisance abatement aims at harm — what the product does to people who use it. One says the market is broken. The other says the product is dangerous.

When a regulator orders structural separation, it acts within a tradition that goes back to Standard Oil. When a judge orders a notification schedule, he is doing something that does not have much precedent at all.

The ninety-hour cap is the part worth sitting with.

Three hours a day. That is what it works out to, roughly. A court has quantified the safe exposure limit for a social media platform the way an environmental agency quantifies the safe exposure limit for a chemical. There is an implicit claim buried in that number — that attention is a resource that can be depleted, that it has a threshold beyond which harm accumulates, that the threshold can be known and enforced.

Tim Wu called the business model “the attention merchant” — companies that harvest human attention and resell it. The framing was economic. What the New Mexico court has done is something Wu’s metaphor gestured at but never reached. It has treated attention like a regulated substance. Not a commodity to be traded but an exposure to be limited.

Ninety hours is not a principle. It is a spec. And the shift from principle to spec is the entire move.

There are problems with this, and they are obvious.

Why ninety? The number is not derived from a dose-response curve. There is no study that found ninety hours safe and ninety-one hours harmful. The court is drawing a line that is — necessarily — arbitrary. But this is what courts do. Speed limits are arbitrary too. The number matters less than the fact that someone drew it.

Enforcement is another question. Meta operates globally. A usage cap for New Mexico teenagers requires age verification, geolocation, and cross-platform time tracking between Facebook and Instagram. The technical surface area is large. Whether Meta complies in substance or in theater remains to be seen.

And then there is the precedent. If New Mexico can order ninety hours, California can order sixty. Texas can order a hundred and twenty but only for certain content categories. Every state court becomes a product manager with jurisdiction. The fragmentation problem is real — and it may be the thing that finally pushes federal legislation, if only because the alternative is fifty different notification schedules.

The $420 million earmarked for treatment services — therapy, counseling, clinical support for young people — is the part of the order that will do the most immediate good. The rest funds awareness campaigns, prevention programs, and screening over five years. These are real allocations for real harm. They should not be overshadowed by the product mandates.

But the product mandates are what set this apart. Fines are transactional. Pay the number, move on. Platform changes are operational. They reshape the product for every user in the jurisdiction, every day, for as long as the order stands.

A court has written a number on a wall and told a company: this far, no further. Not “be responsible.” Not “consider the wellbeing of minors.” Ninety hours. Notifications off at ten. No like counts if you are seventeen.

After years of hearings and hand-wringing and voluntary commitments that committed to nothing — a judge picked a number.

We will find out what that is worth.