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.