So because it would be more convenient for you we need government intervention?
I mean, I know from the American cultural point of view, government intervention is like a last resort, and you have to prove that it's absolutely necessary in order to apply it. Government is seen as an enemy and every one of its actions seen as a potential limiter of freedom, hence the right to bear arms (I hope it never becomes necessary, I suspect guns vs. drones and missiles wouldn't be a very fair fight).
But we are talking about an EU directive here. As an European, if the government makes regulations that make life more convenient for me (and other citizens), that's amazing, it's what I'm voting and paying them for. And I think most Europeans would see it that way.
It’s amazing what people can do without needing the nanny state.
What next? Standardizing poser cords will help reduce terrorism and protect children?
I understood the parent post as arguing that having a unique cable isn't so bad because you get one for free with the device, among other things. While this is true, my counter is that having a single cable over multiple devices is still nice.
The government also made interracial marriage illegal as recently as 50 years ago and same sex relationships illegal as recently as the 80s.
You’ll have to excuse me if I’d rather not give the government power unnecessarily.
The government cares most about their own power. It’s naive to think that the government “cares” about anything besides being re-elected.
The government should be involved in regulating where there are negative externalities. Negative externalities are not - I don’t like having two cables.
Also politicians care about what the majority wants. As long as you’re part of that majority you’re fine. But if you aren’t - the last thing you want is more government power.
Businesses don’t have the ability to take away my property or liberty. The government does. Given a choice between the two, Id rather the government have less power.
I leave open if this particular intervention on chargers is beneficial for the public or not, but you will have to argue about chargers to make a point, not about governments and markets.
The difference is that businesses don’t have the power of the state to compel me to buy their products. I can change phones a lot easier than I can change governments.
I want my iPhone and my Android phone and my tablet and my notebook to share the same charging port. I would definitely buy an iPhone with USB-C if the market would offer one to me. However, the market won't give that to me. Even if 90% of iPhone buyers would prefer USB-C over Lightning, Apple would not give it to us, because it is beneficial for their business to build their own walled garden.
I don't know if forcing Apple to agree with other vendors is a net benefit for all consumers or not. However, as you seem to have a very strong opinion on why that would be detrimental to consumers, you need to show where consumers would be negatively affected, specifically for charging ports.
This has nothing to do with what one thinks about governments in general.
But why stop at the connector? Why not force Apple to make AirDrop, FaceTime interoperable? Why not force Apple to port iCloud backups to Android or force Apple to allow backups to third party providers?
Making things a little more convenient for everybody is super-compelling if there is no downside. Freedom for humans is an extremely high value. However, companies are not humans, there is no inherent benefit in giving them as much freedom as possible. And I know economics well enough to confidently state that freedom for companies does not naturally cause well-being and freedom for humans.
And definitely: Every country regulated power outlets. Every country regulated landline phone connections. Every country regulated mobile phone transmission. EU even regulated mobile phone roaming prices. Now they are regulating chargers. And I hope they won't stop, but do everything to keep modern technology open. Industry loves to lock consumers into separate, proprietary, walled gardens. There is no viable strategy for individual consumers to escape. The only viable strategy to escape is by regulation.
As far as not being able to escape, before 2007-2010, everyone feared the Windows lock-in, technology and the market made that not as big of a fear. Before that it was IBM.
By the time the slow moving government finally made a decision about IBM’s mainframe monopoly that it started in the 60s - in the mid 80s - the market had made the case irrelevant.
As far as everyone liking the files of the EU - see Brexit.
Where is the advantage in waiting for the market?
However, no one forces you to live in the EU. Even countries can exit it. Let us do our thing, and you can do your thing. The market will sort it out :-)
Microsoft is just as dominant with Office and desktop PCs as it was in the 90s. The web and then mobile just made the desktop less relevant.
Also it wasn’t the choice of browsers that made Windows less relevant. It was that everything moving to the web made Windows less relevant and that gave to the rise of the modern mobile platforms now that you could do everything on the web that most people cared about and then the app economy.
What do you really think had a bigger impact on even IE losing marketshare, browser choice or the most popular website destination - Google - giving prime advertising real estate to Chrome and Google bundling Chrome with third party apps left and right?
We also see from FB that the little fines that governments hand out don’t stop corporations from behaving in a way that the government doesn’t like.
But is “think about the environment” the new “think about the children” and “terrorism” war cry for more regulation and big government?
I don’t like the needlessly proprietary cable and I actually put that on the list of reasons not to upgrade to a newer iPhone.
When I look at switching to Android I weigh the crappy Apple cable against the loss of privacy of moving to Android.
The iPhone wins. Just.
If Apple saw that enough customers switch to Android because of the cable they would change - free markets are amazing.
There aren’t two platforms with equal privacy available but differing power connectors.
I’m forced to prioritise privacy over proprietary connectivity.
If all things were equal then I could vote with my wallet and I’m sure the market would fix this... but all things aren’t equal so market isn’t going to solve this problem.
In that situation you need an external authority to set a standard.
Note that as consumer, I can't vote with my money for standardization. I can only vote for one of the proprietary solutions. So if 70% of consumers stick to one option, and 30% stick to the other option (because of other product features), standardization will never happen through market forces, even if 100% of the consumers would want it.
It gets even worse when more than 2 options are on the market, and vendors gain an advantage by locking customers in to their proprietary option.
It’s perfectly possible to have sensible hardware standards where doing so will not impede the market without insisting that all software be also standardised.
For the record I think it would be useful for Apple to have the built in Facetime client be able to communicate with other phone platforms. I don’t think Apple should be compelled to offer that currently.
The Android market is just like the PC market of old - a slow moving race to the bottom. Even today, most low end Android phones are still using Micro USB.
Again, to not be misunderstood, I'm not sure if charger standardization is indeed overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone. That is what I believe we should discuss here.
You can't have it both way dude unless you think Apple is afraid and going to loose money which might bring down the stock value.
85% of the world chooses Android. If you want to choose your browser, you are free to choose Android also.
Maybe try to look at this differently: is your life better for the fact that when you travel you need to bring power plug adapters? If cars had different gas plugs that required different gas stations, would that be nice?
But in fact, you can sell a car with non standard methods of making it move - see Tesla. They didn’t have to wait for the nanny state or other manufacturers to agree on a standard before it started shipping cars.
The market decided it was worth the tradeoff.
The regulation set out to do something and the problem is basically solved. It worked.