4 ms·

Soooo since hn has a strong libertarian streak, what's the downside? Certainly forcing the standization of chargers seemed to make life easier across the worl

Soooo since hn has a strong libertarian streak, what's the downside? Certainly forcing the standization of chargers seemed to make life easier across the world.

comboy 11y ago
Sometimes such regulations are good, sometimes they're not. If some company makes a bad decision then it hurts that company and gives advantage to other companies. If regulator makes a bad decision, there is no escape from it and there are completely no consequences for him. Often it's even hard to tell if something is going to turn out to be a good decision or bad. So even ignoring potential corruption or incompetence and assuming best intentions, it's still seems better to me not to depend on a single entity. > Certainly forcing the standization of chargers Nobody forced anybody. There was no EU regulation that all phones must use such and such charger. Companies were simply optimizing for profit and that decision aligned with it.
- wycx 11y ago
  Whilst compliance with the European Initiative [1] is voluntary, I find it hard to believe that without the EU proposing the Initiative (presumably with an implied threat of a non-voluntary initiative), that phone manufacturers would all have magically chosen to optimise profit by employing standard micro USB. I vividly recall the days of smartphones with custom variants of usb cables. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
  - comboy 11y ago
    Sorry, I wasn't awary of this Initiative. I still would say that it is in best manufacturers interest and they would switch, just like now they are switching to USB-C, but maybe I am wrong after all.
    - stuaxo 11y ago
      It was the wild west of cables. Samsung / LG etc were the worst with cables you couldn't even use with different models. Nokia + Sony were the best as theirs worked for all their respective phones + later nokia switched to USB micro. The standards change made everything so much better!
- vidarh 11y ago
  > Nobody forced anybody. There was no EU regulation that all phones must use such and such charger. There was no EU regulation because the manufacturers fell in line when the EU threatened them with much stricter rules than what they "asked" them to adopt.
jerf 11y ago
The companies may have to raise prices on normal services to make up for it. I haven't seen the profits they're making so I don't know if they're going to have to, but they may. People often overestimate corporate profits. They hear some company made two billion dollars in profits and start going "ohmygersh what rapacious capitalists", until you notice that they made two billion in profit on fifty-two billion in revenue while employing fifty thousand people. Making two cents of profit on 52 cents of transaction probably doesn't sound quite as bad, and then when you realize that if their costs were merely 4% higher it would have wiped out all their profit (and put the 50,000 employees at risk), and you probably come to a better understanding of the situation. So, what kind of cost increase for the companies is this going to be? I don't know. Also, I don't mean that "a better understanding of the situation" means that you'll always feel sorry for the big companies, or something; I just mean you'll get a more realistic view of the situation in general, which is good regardless of your goals. I made the numbers up, but the orders of magnitude are reasonable. There are some very large companies that make more than ~5% profit, but it's actually not a large list; 5% is not that uncommon.
- revelation 11y ago
  Oh, you can be assured that the profit margins for roaming are 99%+, and if they aren't, it's because of unrelated wastage. Because ever since the internet was invented, it has obviously become very, very, very cheap to send data all over the world. And this is what we're talking about: your SMS needs to go from the provider in country A to provider in country B. How does it do that? Via a standardized protocol over the internet. How much does that cost? Nothing, all the network components have an internet uplink anyway. The only thing left to explain high roaming prices is market failure, hence the need to intervene by the EU. Only we had the market failure pour its money into the EU, so it's very far off from the regulatory intervention that should have been made.
  - bpodgursky 11y ago
    The point is not margin on roaming, it's overall corporate profit margin. If roaming is cheaper, something else is now more expensive, given that the company's profit margin isn't high to start with. Roaming fees are probably more progressive anyway and subsidizing plans for less mobile people, aka income limited people.

Soooo since hn has a strong libertarian streak, what's the downside? Certainly forcing the standization of chargers seemed to make life easier across the world.

comboy 11y ago

Sometimes such regulations are good, sometimes they're not. If some company makes a bad decision then it hurts that company and gives advantage to other companies. If regulator makes a bad decision, there is no escape from it and there are completely no consequences for him. Often it's even hard to tell if something is going to turn out to be a good decision or bad. So even ignoring potential corruption or incompetence and assuming best intentions, it's still seems better to me not to depend on a single entity. > Certainly forcing the standization of chargers Nobody forced anybody. There was no EU regulation that all phones must use such and such charger. Companies were simply optimizing for profit and that decision aligned with it.

wycx 11y ago
Whilst compliance with the European Initiative [1] is voluntary, I find it hard to believe that without the EU proposing the Initiative (presumably with an implied threat of a non-voluntary initiative), that phone manufacturers would all have magically chosen to optimise profit by employing standard micro USB. I vividly recall the days of smartphones with custom variants of usb cables. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
- comboy 11y ago
  Sorry, I wasn't awary of this Initiative. I still would say that it is in best manufacturers interest and they would switch, just like now they are switching to USB-C, but maybe I am wrong after all.
  - stuaxo 11y ago
    It was the wild west of cables. Samsung / LG etc were the worst with cables you couldn't even use with different models. Nokia + Sony were the best as theirs worked for all their respective phones + later nokia switched to USB micro. The standards change made everything so much better!
vidarh 11y ago
> Nobody forced anybody. There was no EU regulation that all phones must use such and such charger. There was no EU regulation because the manufacturers fell in line when the EU threatened them with much stricter rules than what they "asked" them to adopt.

jerf 11y ago

The companies may have to raise prices on normal services to make up for it. I haven't seen the profits they're making so I don't know if they're going to have to, but they may. People often overestimate corporate profits. They hear some company made two billion dollars in profits and start going "ohmygersh what rapacious capitalists", until you notice that they made two billion in profit on fifty-two billion in revenue while employing fifty thousand people. Making two cents of profit on 52 cents of transaction probably doesn't sound quite as bad, and then when you realize that if their costs were merely 4% higher it would have wiped out all their profit (and put the 50,000 employees at risk), and you probably come to a better understanding of the situation. So, what kind of cost increase for the companies is this going to be? I don't know. Also, I don't mean that "a better understanding of the situation" means that you'll always feel sorry for the big companies, or something; I just mean you'll get a more realistic view of the situation in general, which is good regardless of your goals. I made the numbers up, but the orders of magnitude are reasonable. There are some very large companies that make more than ~5% profit, but it's actually not a large list; 5% is not that uncommon.

revelation 11y ago
Oh, you can be assured that the profit margins for roaming are 99%+, and if they aren't, it's because of unrelated wastage. Because ever since the internet was invented, it has obviously become very, very, very cheap to send data all over the world. And this is what we're talking about: your SMS needs to go from the provider in country A to provider in country B. How does it do that? Via a standardized protocol over the internet. How much does that cost? Nothing, all the network components have an internet uplink anyway. The only thing left to explain high roaming prices is market failure, hence the need to intervene by the EU. Only we had the market failure pour its money into the EU, so it's very far off from the regulatory intervention that should have been made.
- bpodgursky 11y ago
  The point is not margin on roaming, it's overall corporate profit margin. If roaming is cheaper, something else is now more expensive, given that the company's profit margin isn't high to start with. Roaming fees are probably more progressive anyway and subsidizing plans for less mobile people, aka income limited people.