Governance arrives after the product

CIGI's outlook on the shifts shaping technology and global power in 2026 describes governance as largely reactive while private firms operate as the effective power brokers. That description fits this category precisely, and the mechanism deserves to be spelled out rather than left as a general observation.

Design decisions on these devices are made in a small number of places, mostly the United States and China, and they ship identically everywhere. Whether the indicator is bright or subtle, whether a physical shutter exists, whether audio capture is on by default, whether the assistant listens continuously. Each is settled at design time by a product team, and each arrives in every market simultaneously as a finished fact.

A rule-taker cannot regulate a convention that already formed

By the time a regulator anywhere examines the question, millions of units are in circulation and a public expectation has formed around how the thing behaves. Changing it then means asking a manufacturer to ship a different build for one jurisdiction, which is expensive, or accepting the existing default and regulating around the edges, which is what usually happens.

Smaller jurisdictions face this most sharply. Canada, where we work, is a market of no particular consequence to a global eyewear supply chain, and a Canadian requirement that no other country imposes is a requirement a manufacturer can decline to meet. That is not a complaint about corporate behaviour. It is arithmetic.

This is a standards problem posing as a policy problem

We would put the effort into technical standardisation rather than into fourteen national consultations that arrive after the fact. A shared specification for capture signalling, agreed before the installed base is large, is the only intervention that reaches the design stage where these choices are actually made.

The difficulty is obvious and we would rather state it than route around it. Standards bodies in this space are populated by the manufacturers whose defaults are the subject, and a specification for the protection of non-customers written by a room full of vendors starts at a disadvantage. It still beats arriving in 2031 to regulate a convention that hardened in 2026.