Google Calls Proposed U.S. Wassenaar Rules ‘Not Feasible’
Dennis Fisher / Threatpost :
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's verdict that the proposed U.S. Wassenaar rules are 'not feasible' lands five months after it branded an FBI plan to expand government hacking authority a monumental constitutional threat — the same year, the same playbook: contesting state technical mandates on the grounds that they cannot work as drafted, not merely that they are costly.
The position is consistent across administrations and venues. Google later sought a Huawei export-ban exemption while warning the ban itself could compromise national security, pressed the Biden administration for a US-EU technology council citing an explosion of fragmented national policies, and told the European Commission that targeting DNS resolvers, VPNs, and IPs against piracy was ineffective and easily circumvented. Wassenaar is the export-control instance of a single argument: rules written without regard to how global infrastructure actually moves get litigated in public by the company they target.
First-order effects
- Google has put the U.S. negotiating position on record as contested before any rules are finalized, handing allied delegations and domestic critics a named industry counterargument to the American draft.
- For Google and peer exporters of the technologies the rules would cover, the complaint reframes the issue from compliance cost to operational impossibility — a stronger claim to carry into any license-regime design discussion.
Second-order effects
- Other vendors facing the same regime gain cover to echo Google's feasibility critique instead of absorbing the compliance burden quietly, eroding the consensus the U.S. needs to sell the draft to Wassenaar partners.
- Each public fight strengthens Google's standing as a mandatory consultee in technical rulemaking — the track that runs through the FBI dispute, the Huawei exemption request, and the Commission filings — making regulators likelier to test drafts against platform objections up front.
Third-order effects
- Across FBI hacking powers, Wassenaar, Huawei exemptions, and the EU anti-piracy filings, the pattern points toward export-control and surveillance rules being stress-tested in public by the companies they govern, shifting negotiations toward feasibility arguments rather than principle.
- If governments keep drafting controls that major platforms deem circumventable, implementation drifts from multilateral frameworks toward unilateral national rules — precisely the policy fragmentation Google's technology-council proposal argued against, with unclear long-run consequences for how security-relevant technology crosses borders.
The trend: Export-control and digital-policy rulemaking is becoming a series of public feasibility fights between states and the platform companies whose infrastructure the rules would govern.