Last week, we looked back at how 2024 made Elon Musk the world’s most powerful man. Today, we’re looking at a few other important themes that will influence the online and offline worlds in 2025.

Tech takes a legal beating

Google: Ruled an illegal monopoly in August, Google could be broken up. The results are anybody’s guess, but what seemed impossible for a company worth $2.5tn is at play. The US has asked the judge in the case for a wholesale breakup of the giant, which would force it to divest Chrome, the world’s most popular browser and one of Google’s core businesses.

TikTok: The US passed a law that will, in t-minus three weeks, either force TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell its popular video app, or push it entirely dark in the US. Of the two possibilities, a ban is more likely, as ByteDance has said divestment is impossible, and Beijing has opposed a sale. As with Google, what seemed so implausible is now very possible: TikTok could be well and truly banned. Only the US supreme court now stands between TikTok and its closure. If you had told me a year ago that TikTok would disappear at the same time we published a story cheekily headlined How 2023 became the year Congress forgot to ban TikTok, I would have laughed. TikTok has become the center of American online culture, though perhaps Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts will fill the absence.

Social media companies likewise faced difficult legal headwinds in Australia. Read on to the next section for more on that.

Should kids have tech?

The dual revolutions of smartphones and social media have made their way to the youngest among us. Now, as their guardians, we’re tasked with setting the boundaries for them. However, we don’t yet know where those guardrails should be.

The wildfire-hot debate over kids and social media began in earnest in March, when psychologist and social scientist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation. Haidt attributes today’s crisis in teen mental health to social media and the loss of unstructured playtime. The book shot to the top of bestseller lists, where it remains; Haidt’s explanation has hit a nerve. I think he’s wrong; you can read why here.

Schools across the US instituted policies that prohibit smartphone usage during the school day to varying degrees. Los Angeles’s school district, the second-largest in the US, announced its phone prohibition in June. Parents fought back while simultaneously bemoaning how much time their children spend on their phones. The UK, which has banned phones from schools nationwide, looked on with perplexity.

Australia took the most extreme step in November when it banned any child under 16 from social media, though the new law will only go into effect in a year after tests of age-gating software in the country. Much remains unknown about the law – particularly, how it will be enforced – but it is the most restrictive in the world. Read more about it here.

The Guardian’s series on social media’s role in the exploitation and trafficking of children has been shortlisted for a Fetisov Journalism award for outstanding contributions to civil rights.

You can read the first story in the series here: ‘If Instagram didn’t exist, it wouldn’t have happened’: a mother’s search for her trafficked daughter

Crypto bounces back

Of any niche in tech, cryptocurrency had the worst 2023. Sam Bankman-Fried’s multibillion-dollar fraud at FTX became worldwide news, and crypto’s most famous man became the mascot for its worst impulses as he was convicted of wire fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Then the US went after Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. That company admitted to money laundering, paid a fine and lost its CEO, Changpeng Zhao. Bitcoin ended the year at a price of roughly $42,000.

Then, like Elon Musk and AI, cryptocurrency had a great time in 2024. Bitcoin soared to $100,000. Chalk that up to the close alliance between Donald Trump and the cryptocurrency industry. He’s the first US presidential candidate to accept donations in crypto, after all, and he’s started his own cryptocurrency venture. Polymarket and Kalshi, prediction betting markets built on blockchain technology, rose to prominence as a new and influential type of political polling. Polymarket’s CEO bragged that Trump had called him from Mar-a-Lago to talk about the odds on the site and to praise it as more reliable than traditional polling, which continues to lose trust.

Listen to our podcast about the bromance between Trump and cryptocurrency here.

Read about the success of prediction betting markets like Polymarket and Kalshi and how they’re planning to capitalize on it in 2025.

AI and its chips dominate the stock market

Nvidia, the maker of the chips most coveted for programming artificial intelligence, is the biggest financial winner of 2024. Its share price has tripled since the start of the year. Consider the headlines the Guardian ran in coverage of its earnings reports:

• November: Nvidia earnings: AI chip leader shows no signs of stopping mammoth growth
• August: Nvidia rides big tech’s AI investment to beat Wall Street’s sky-high expectations. (There was a brief but precipitous dip in the share price in late August that was quickly erased.)
• May: Nvidia reports stratospheric growth as AI boom shows no sign of stopping

Google likewise reaped enormous benefits from the financial frenzy for AI. Even as it endured a flogging in US courts, its stock value climbed higher and higher with each announcement of each new AI thingamajig, more than doubling its share price since the start of 2024. There were multiple versions of Gemini, Google’s flagship AI assistant capable of understanding images and words as well as generating them. The model underpins Google’s AI-generated search result summaries, perhaps its most visible AI product. I would characterize the investor reaction to Google’s announcements as such: “An AI that summarizes your notes and makes a podcast out of them? How neat! Hard to see that finding a long-term use case. Regardless, here’s $50bn in market cap.” Would AI podcasting software become a $50bn company on its own? No, certainly not. But in Google’s hands, who knows? Google is likewise not known as a chipmaker, yet the announcement this month that the company had developed an AI chip in-house with improved performance and less energy consumption caused its stock to rise 12%, a $250bn growth for its market capitalization.

A slew of other smaller companies have likewise financially drafted off the AI boom: OpenAI raised $6.5bn this year; Reddit, the beneficiary of deals for its archive of high-quality text data, debuted on the US stock market this year and saw its share price steadily rise to more than triple its starting share price; Databricks, which provides software for storing and analyzing huge amounts of data, brought in $10bn in investment; Broadcom, which makes chips and data-center software, is worth $1tn as of 13 December. Taiwan Semiconductor, an integral part of the AI supply chain, hit the same market cap milestone in October.

The arrest of Telegram’s CEO prompts change

Pavel Durov’s arrest in August put Telegram’s lax approach to content moderation in the spotlight. The founder and CEO of the app, which boasts nearly a billion users, was detained in France and indicted on 12 charges, including “allowing criminal activity” on his app. French authorities accused him of complicity in the distribution of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, which he denies. His case is still pending as he remains on bail in France.

Prior to the arrest, Telegram was known for how little it policed what its users said and what they sent. Now, it’s publishing reports on how effective its moderation is. It announced it would crack down on harmful content like fraud and terrorism in September, and this month, it announced AI had enabled it to remove some 15m groups and channels dedicated to illegal behavior. The change, though confined to one corner of the internet, means that a billion people now speak to each other in quite a different landscape than before.

My favorite Guardian tech stories of 2024

• Why I regret using 23andMe: I gave up my DNA just to find out I’m British
  Kari Paul gave away her genetic information to a now imploding company for results that inspired nothing but ambivalence.

• How did Donald Trump end up posting Taylor Swift deepfakes?
  AI images posted on Truth Social bore the watermark of a tiny Texas non-profit looking to bankroll X users.

• A predator used her 12-year-old face to make porn. She helped pass a law to make that a crime
  Child actor Kaylin Hayman fought back after she learned that a man had used AI to make child sex abuse materials from images on her Instagram page.

• She didn’t get an apartment because of an AI-generated score – and sued to help others avoid the same fate
  Despite a stellar reference from a landlord of 17 years, Mary Louis was rejected after being screened by firm SafeRent.

• Revealed: a California city is training AI to spot homeless encampments
  San Jose invited tech companies to mount cameras on a vehicle in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind experiment.

• Get away, grizzly: why scientists are chasing bears with drones
  Wildlife experts in the US west have found that small aircraft are ideal for protecting humans and livestock from predators.

• The Anxious Generation wants to save teens. But the bestseller’s anti-tech logic is skewed
  There’s no doubt about the mental health crisis facing young people. Jonathan Haidt blames our devices – and oversimplifies the problem.

• Tesla owners turn against Musk: ‘I’m embarrassed driving this car around’
  The electric car brand was once a liberal favourite – but the CEO’s embrace of Trump has led to an angry backlash.