"Designs to Stick" and "Designs to Wrestle" - What the AB 1709 Litigation Asks of Technology
"Designs to Retain" and "Designs to Cultivate" - The Questions Raised by the AB 1709 Lawsuit About the Intentions of Technology Google, Meta, and TikTok have filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the enforcement of California State Law AB 1709. This is a dispute over regulations aimed at preventing children from becoming dependent on "psychologically exploitative features" (The Guardian, November 5, 2026). As an engineer, I feel it's worth looking into this lawsuit beyond just the legal aspects. The point of contention isn't "the screen itself" but rather "the design intention." Given the same hardware and rendering pipeline, different objective functions can lead to diametrically opposed results. Maximizing stay time is an optimization that is fundamentally different from altering the user's visual function. The former rewards session length, while the latter rewards binocular disparity signals - the optimization targets differ. Amblyopia (lazy eye)…
Google, Meta, and TikTok are suing to block California state law AB 1709. The law aims to regulate "psychologically exploitative features" that make children dependent. A related technology, Amblyotube, developed by Seven Sports for Meta Quest, helps with vision training and is designed to improve visual coordination and depth perception. It provides customized visual exercises for users with lazy eye or other visual impairments. The app is available on Meta Quest.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's report — not a translation of it. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.