I’m waiting to watch or read the first story to postulate making smartphones illegal like drugs. Chinese Triads smuggling phones across border, massive gun battles between rival “phangs” fighting over turf, etc.
Phones aren't addictive on their own, and I can prove it in one step: just disable any ability to connect to the internet for a whole week and tell me your phone usage during that time.
If nobody had phones the interest in them would fade for anyone being given a phone, because let's be honest here: how much content are you dealing with that hasn't involved using internet to access somebody ELSE's stuff? News is other people doing things, learning is other people teaching us, chatting is with other people, etc.
I can perhaps see a sci-fi take on internet usage being given out through world-government prescriptions, rationed access to the "escape world". Which reminds me of the setting for Ready Player One and its slums, just without the fanservice and with a much more realistic and grim vibe.
Unlikely unless it starts becoming violent and challenges the government's monopoly on violence.
It's not that drugs are of concern to citizens but the people involved in the supply side are essentially directly challenging the government in a market that it refuses to regulate.
Whoever holds control over the apparatus for distributing violence the most efficiently and at large scale ultimately dictates the laws. Anybody posing a challenge to this basic low common denominator will become a target of the State which declares itself as the sole monopoly over violence.
This is why I believe countries fight all the time, it is simply not enough to hold monopoly over your own borders, to maintain its "large security apparatus" it needs new threats otherwise it stops growing, losing momentum and many groups declaring their own autonomous zones will find it easy to challenge the government as we saw in Syria and Arab Spring countries.
Why would anyone do that? Smartphones make a whole lot of the economy a whole lot of money. I imagine there'd be a much bigger fight that over say, drugs or even AR-style rifles.
