The digital world we live in today was a choice. So is our online future.

They did not decide that services should compete to capture their childhood, that algorithms should shape the world they see, or that vast quantities of their personal data should be collected and monetised.

Too often, the dominant narrative surrounding technology is wrongly cast as inevitable: that the sector's scale, speed and global reach place it beyond the influence of governments, citizens and the societies it serves.

But that is wrong. The digital world did not emerge by accident.

This is the core insight central to Beeban Kidron's new book, Users. The digital environment we inhabit today was not pre-destined, and neither is our future. It is the result of commercial and political decisions. The systems that shape our attention, influence our behaviour and affect our real-world relationships are designed to optimise engagement, growth and profit. This is a choice.

Nowhere has the impact of this choice been more apparent or harmful than for our children. As Nelson Mandela observed, there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its kids.

Across my career, from child protection to digital policy, I have seen tech companies treating harm as an unfortunate by-product of how business is done, and progress is made, rather than evidence that those systems need to change.

Too often, intolerable levels of responsibility have been placed on children and parents to navigate environments that were never designed with their basic interests in mind.

This clash between the profit-maximising incentives of the tech companies and the social conditions required for people to flourish first brought Beeban and I together when serving on Prince William's Cyberbullying Taskforce. She recalls how frequently discussion centred on how young people could better manage online risks, ignoring a host of bright ideas from young people themselves to address design choices that shaped those risks in the first place.

The architecture of digital services is not neutral. It influences behaviour, directs attention and determines which outcomes are rewarded, too often with scant regard for the human consequences.

This is illustrated time and again in a succession of heartbreaking true stories cited in Users - from Ethan, who blames himself and his online gaming addiction for his parents' separation, to Sewell, whose emotional dependence on Al contributed to him taking his own life. Kidron reminds us that behind every recommendation system, advertising model or engagement metric lies a set of priorities established by humans.

Technology companies are not uniquely malevolent. Innovation should not be viewed with suspicion. Growth and profit can be good. But just as with drugs, cars, gas, electricity and playgrounds, design choices should be interrogated and regulated with long-established children's rights in mind.

The significance of the book extends well beyond children. Debates about social media increasingly intersect with questions about artificial intelligence, data governance, market power and democratic resilience.

As digital technologies become more deeply embedded in everyday life, the choices made by an increasingly small number of individuals have greater social consequences than ever before. That makes regulation not an obstacle to progress but an essential part of ensuring innovation earns and maintains public trust.

For over ten years, the UK has often played a leading role in this debate, from the Age-Appropriate Design Code to the Online Safety Act. Beeban tells the story of her role at the centre of all this. Now I'm Chair of Rights Foundation, the organisation Beeban founded to champion children's rights in the digital world, I share her ambition and frustration.

Progress has come from refusing to accept that harmful outcomes are the inevitable price of technological advancement. The most effective regulation has not sought to prevent innovation, but to ensure it develops in ways that reflect democratic values and human needs.

The question is not whether technology will continue to shape our lives. It undoubtedly will. The question is whether democratic societies retain the confidence to shape the technology that serves and supports their people.

That, ultimately, is the significance of Users. It rejects the false choice between embracing innovation on the one hand or protecting everything that is central to the healthy development of the individual and the societies we live in, whether that's the intellectual rights of creative artists or the self-esteem of a teenager.

It reminds us that technology reflects values as much as engineering, and that today's digital environment is the product of choices, not destiny.

It's a theme central to another work which majors on the potential dangers of unregulated tech. In Terminator 2, Sarah Connor reflects that "the future is not set. There is no fate, but what we make for ourselves." Killer robots get only a passing mention in Users, but Kidron is clear that fatalism too often characterises debate about technology.

Are we willing to stand up for the outcomes we desire or set on a path down which commercial incentives and technological momentum make the decisions for us?

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Sir Peter Wanless is the Chair of 5Rights Foundation and former CEO of the NSPCC.

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