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> What happens when there is a better USB-C plug EU laws are not like physics laws, you can change them. That's why so many people are employed in policy and l
by mrtksn 4y ago
> What happens when there is a better USB-C plug
EU laws are not like physics laws, you can change them. That's why so many people are employed in policy and law making.
So if it happens that in the land of cable freedoms they come up with something much better, it would be adopted. At first, those electronics which can accommodate more than 1 type of charging plug will start getting this new plug alongside with USB-C and if there's actual demand for it they law will be changed to allow only that plug.
I don't know how much if this is about environmental concerns, I'm under impression that EU is never happy about rent seeing companies and tries to standardise everything. That's probably why it's going after browsers and App stores: it expect company products to be picked for competitive reasons, not compatibility reasons. Another example is EUs enforcement of standardized EV charging plugs, arguably Tesla plugs can be better but overall it's better for everyone to be able to charge everywhere even if it was possible to have slightly better charging plugs on some stations.
I imagine, the US citizens are confused by all this due to the nature of how EU and US function. With GDPR, the American audience was imagining that startups will go bankrupt when trying to comply with EU law and there were tantrums about some people abandoning their projects because they don't have resources to deal with EU regulations. Maybe it's because how lawsuit happy the US is, maybe it's because how the laws are enforced in US is different than most of EU - I don't know, but in general Europeans feel differently than Americans about the government involvement.
- throwaway50606 4y agoHow do you know how to change the laws if nobody is allowed to try different things (thus innovate)? USB-C didn't come from nowhere, and it wasn't a given that it's better than MicroUSB - first the market tested it, then it became a standard. EU laws have worldwide effects, there's no land of cable freedom anymore.
- mrtksn 4y agoEU laws don't expand beyond EU. EU consist about 5% of the population, 95% can have whatever they like. Yes, there's Brussels effect but that effect work when the trouble of designing or producing something else is not worth it. Also, you are not banned from engineering other solutions. The police isn't going to knock on the doors of engineers who are suspected to develop better charging cables :)
- nickpp 4y agoThere are now zero incentives to research and develop better plugs in the EU since it is illegal to market devices sporting them instead of USB-C.
- mrtksn 4y agoThe rest of the world can develop the superior charging cable plugs and we can use this thing called internet to find out about it.
- nickpp 4y agoDepending on the rest of the world for tech, research and innovation is why us, Europeans, are worried about these authoritarian EU mandates which can only cause us falling further behind the rest of the world.
- mrtksn 4y agoCan you give me an example of an EU regulation which prevented an European company invent a technology? I'm familiar with the narrative but I don't know any examples.
- throwaway50606 4y agoGaia-X funneled money to large corporations that used it to market their shitty corporate services and that allowed them to beat actually innovative cloud computing startups.
- mrtksn 4y agoI'm not familiar with this. Did it happen due to the EU regulation which dictated that Gaia-X have to funnel money to large corporations? Which regulation specifically you are blaming this to?
- nickpp 4y ago
- cwillu 4y agoLike quantity, ubiquity has a quality of its own.
- vidarh 4y agoYou're free to try other things. You're just not free to leave out a USB-C plug as long as that is the standard, and you will run into trouble if you try to play stupid games with adding power delivery profiles to your USB-C support that try to circumvent the goal of these regulations of removing device-specific cables or chargers. If Apple "only" ends up offering a certification mark for USB-C chargers that have been tested with the iPhone and makes that easily accessible, they might well be in the clear. If they try to add power delivery profiles that are unavailable to everyone else, chances are the EU will react.
- viraptor 4y agoApart from all the existing answers - usb-c did not come to the phones first either. It was available and tested in many other places first. And it makes sense, because if we ever need over 40Gbps of data, or over 200W power, it's extremely unlikely we'll need it for the phones.