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Comment by Twixes | Hacker News Reader

That's what big business would like you to think, so that you leave them alone. Truth is, the government is the only thing with power that may actually give a damn about you, even if just to get re-elected. Business cares about the bottom line only. Workers' rights, the environment, convenience? All don't matter if they hurt the bottom line.

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Yes businesses care about the bottom line - but the only way they make money is by selling things that people want.

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.

Please make yourself familiar with a bit more modern economic theories. The belief that the unregulated market moves things to an optimum for all participants has been proven to be wrong by modern game theory. Not all economic games have their equilibrium at the optimum for consumers.

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.

And taking a look at history - even recent history. The government definitely doesn’t move things in an optimum way for all participants.

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.

Again, you need to show specifically that a uniform charger is less beneficial to consumers than letting Apple keep their proprietary patent-protected charger.

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.

What I am saying is simple. Giving the government more power without a compelling reason is always detrimental. Making things a little more convenient is not compelling.

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?

I think we have to agree to disagree. I assume that you are not living in the EU. Our experiences here with governmental regulation are not so bad. Companies are complaining, but consumers are not.

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.

No countries did not regulate mobile phone transmissions. The US licenses bandwidth to different companies but did not legislate the protocols. That’s why in the US you had things like push to talk and Sprints aborted 4G non LTE protocol. The market killed it - not the government.

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.

Windows was lock-in in late 90s and early 2000s. That was not only a fear. EU forced Microsoft to open Windows during that time. And that was a good thing. I don't want to wait decades until that stuff is sorted out by obsolescence.

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 :-)

EU had no affect on the browser wars. How do you explain that Chrome took over in the US. Again, Google made a better browser while Microsoft was sleep at the wheel.

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.

Of course, everybody can interpret history as they like. The fine handed out by EU to Microsoft was of course also a deterrent against further similar attempts, and Microsoft afterwards changed their tactics not only in EU, but world-wide. Or did you not get the Windows browser choice menu in US?

No we not did not get the Browser choice in the US. That’s kind of the perfect control to show that government policy didn’t have any effect. Chrome took over in both markets.

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.

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