Eradicating Algorithmic Exploitation and Regulating Digital Addiction through Fiduciary Governance
Eradicating Algorithmic Exploitation and Regulating Digital Addiction through Fiduciary Governance
Abstract
The global transition into the “Post-Turing” digital era has precipitated an unprecedented crisis of online compulsion and addiction. Driven by opaque, probabilistic artificial intelligence algorithms, the contemporary digital ecosystem routinely exploits human psychological vulnerabilities on an industrial scale. This has resulted in skyrocketing rates of online gambling addiction, frictionless and uncontrolled access to regulated goods such as alcohol, and severe screen-time compulsion among both developing children and adults. Current international regulatory frameworks—characterised by voluntary “soft law,” superficial age-verification gateways, and a perilous reliance on the compromised willpower of the end user combined with corporate self-regulation—have entirely failed to mitigate these systemic harms. More critically, these frameworks structurally fail addicted end users, leaving them entirely exposed to algorithmic manipulation without robust, unbypassable tools to regulate their own compulsive behaviours or integrate clinical therapeutic support.
This article explores the pathology of modern digital addictions and proposes a profound paradigm shift in online governance through the implementation of the FiduNode™ framework. As a high-level digital fiduciary architecture, the FiduNode™ framework radically redefines both platform liability and end-user regulation. By embedding secure, privacy-preserving identity verification, infrastructure-level access controls, and statutory fiduciary duties into the fabric of the internet, FiduNode™ offers a definitive, enforceable solution. This article details how the overarching FiduNode™ architecture empowers users, medical professionals, and judicial systems to set unbreakable digital boundaries. It demonstrates the enforcement of irrevocable self-exclusion, dynamic clinical rehabilitation pathways, algorithmic circuit-breakers, the mitigation of risk compensation (the Peltzman Effect), and the creation of sanctuary environments, all without compromising fundamental digital privacy or civil liberties. Ultimately, the FiduNode™ framework represents the necessary evolution from an exploitative Resource-Based View to a Legitimacy-Based View, securing the digital commons and providing a structural scaffold for human recovery and digital sobriety.