For Google Glass, Google lobbying against distracted driving regulation in 3 US states
Exclusive: Google sets roadblocks to stop distracted driver legislation — (Reuters) - Google is lobbying officials in at least three U.S. states to stop proposed restrictions on driving with headsets …
Context & Ripple Effects
The fight over Glass on the road has been running since March 2013, when lawmakers first moved to ban the headset behind the wheel. Since then Google has worked the regulatory map jurisdiction by jurisdiction: in January 2014 it reportedly talked the UK government into letting drivers keep Glass on, and this Reuters exclusive shows the same playbook arriving at the state level in the US.
The lobbying push also sits on top of a longer foundation — Google's driverless car program was already drawing political power in Washington as far back as October 2012 (WSJ on the car's political muscle) — so the statehouse effort reads less like a one-off defense of Glass and more like an extension of an established regulatory strategy. The pickup across eight outlets (Ars Technica, Quartz, Re/code, Gigaom, CNET among them) signals how closely the industry is watching whether device-specific driving laws gain traction.
First-order effects
- Lawmakers in at least three US states now face organized opposition to headset-driving restrictions, forcing each bill's sponsors to defend language that distinguishes Glass from ordinary hands-free devices.
- Glass owners in those states get a reprieve for now, but Google's lobbying spend makes the product's road legality a matter of negotiated policy rather than settled law.
Second-order effects
- If one or more states pass device-specific bans anyway, Google inherits a patchwork of state-by-state rules for a single SKU — the kind of fragmentation cost that pushes wearable makers to lobby preemptively rather than reactively.
- Rival heads-up-display and wearable vendors get a free ride on whatever carve-outs Google wins, since legislation framed around 'headsets' rather than Glass would sweep in their products too.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward tech companies writing their own operating rules before regulators do: Google's statehouse work on Glass rehearses the same playbook its driverless car unit has run since 2012, positioning the company as the default counterpart when states legislate new device categories.
- If the three-state push holds the line, expect device-neutral distracted-driving standards (hands-free performance tests) to become the compromise template, replacing per-product bans that can't keep up with hardware cycles.
The trend: Consumer-hardware makers are shifting from reacting to state regulation to pre-empting it, with Google applying its driverless-car lobbying model to wearable devices jurisdiction by jurisdiction.