USB regulation is precisely the definition of “progressive” overreach. I don’t want any government dictating my device specifications (unless those specs are designed to reduce health risks or radio interference.)
The EU decided that having a single standard port to charge a smartphone was a good idea and in the long run, save a little bit of money and a little bit on electronic waste since people would be able to go to any store and purchase for sale 1 Standard Smartphone Charger™ and 1 Standard Smartphone Cable™.
Then they conferred their preference to the Smartphone Industry™ and said "Okay, you guys sort it out. Pick a standard, incorporate it going forward, or we will bring down the regulatory hammer and not even we want to do that."
At that point USB was proving to be more or less a de facto standard anyway, so the industry said okay, settled on that, and somehow Apple got away with being able to just bundle in an adapter for the Standard Smartphone Cable™. The benefit of this approach rather than the EU swinging the regulatory hammer is it leaves the industry free to update it, say from micro-USB to USB-C, as improvements come along, rather than the EU decreeing that all smartphones use micro-USB which would be Terrible. Thus we have a Standard by Agreement, rather than a Standard by Law and life goes on pretty okay.
For good or for ill, the EU has a massive amount of soft power in their lawmaking alone with repercussions that go beyond the 28 (soon to be 27 again) member states. Any smartphone designer is free to take their phone and go home, but that's a lot of money to leave on the table and its not like anybody particularly liked the old crappy connectors of the past.
> soon to be 27 again
My bet is still on a Norway-like solution, which saves (some) face for the Tories and has minimal consequences.
But I am known to be an optimist from time to time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#R...
The power rating was identical; but, they had some kind of crazy, DRM-like scheme in place.
I'm very glad that I can now use or buy a cable anywhere and use pretty much any block, even an inefficient one.
‘Almost every household is believed to have gathered a number of old chargers – estimated to generate more than 51 000 tons of electronic waste per year in the EU.’ [1]
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/electrical-engineering/re...
Moral of the story: never throw out old cables ... (maybe)
What "market" is is a big bunch of entities trying to maximise the output and minimise the input (in a large large majority of cases). Everything else is a side effect. In order to impose upon those entities anything, the customer base needs to be diverse enough to include potential opposers to the company's policy, and the number of the opposers who decide to boycott or move away should be large enough that such action significantly affects the company's margins. And that's not so easy to happen, especially if the bad the "big players" are doing does not directly affect the customers (e.g. saying "guns are murderous and destructive" will not affect the gun owners all that much, or "your pesticides kill bees" the pesticide users, no?) and thus the vigilance of the market is triply-restricted: by time it takes to produce effects, by the amount of opposition actors it requires, and by the nature of commerce. Thus, it can not produce timely change, requires and is thus fallible to lots of rhetoric, and is only maybe-efficient in a small set of industries and cases.
There's a confirmation bias at work. There are infinite examples of the market working suboptimally for one consumer, a group of consumers, or consumers as a whole. But the entire platform is built upon creating value for consumers. People choose to pay for goods and services they want. In another system, they could be assigned arbitrarily. Or even completely unavailable. Capitalism created things you'd never expect, like broadband internet access and social networking to name a couple.
It certainly is in the interest of enterprises to provide value to consumers. But so too is to do that as cheaply as possible, in order to have the largest margins possible. The one to sell for cheapest will prevail. Even if that means making people work for the bare minimum that'll keep them alive and poisoning them with murderous materials in subhuman working conditions. Even if that means starving an entire ecosystem to death to grow some grains or whatnot. That's where regulation kicks in. It sets the ground for competition without harming the rest of the world.
We do not disagree. But you're believing mistakenly that I am criticising capitalism. While I instead am telling that like every powerful resource, capital too needs to be heavily controlled and supervised. If you live somewhere where the market and capitalism is not doing shady things to cut costs and sell cheaper, tell me which utopian place/planet you are at, so that I can join you lot. But in the real world lots of starving hands touch everything we wear and tap and click. Regulation is necessary so that one's life don't cost many others' lives.
I guess a lot of it comes down to whether we are satisfied with the state of humanity, and whether we recognize past progress as an overall good.
Same with not creating bee-killing pesticides. The markets created them and never stopped despite them being extremely harmful to the environment. But who cares, under capitalism profits matter above all so let's continue producing them.