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> being granted a monopoly

Anyone can produce USB-C chargers. That's not a monopoly. This will effectively enable competition on the charging market, since the big players can't bind their products to their own proprietary chargers anymore.

Have you ever felt the Apple/Microsoft charger to be lacking in some way? Breaking easily, too long cords, too short, wrong color, too expensive? Congratulations now you can make and sell those better chargers. Before, this was not possible.

Yes but all you’re really doing is encouraging everyone to stay locked in to a USB-C market. This isn’t enabling competition in the charging market, it’s eliminating or hamstringing competing markets. You won’t create a new charging apparatus because you’re legally required to use USB-C.

"What if we created a charging cable that did X,Y,Z?"

"That would be cool but we have to use USB-C"

> Have you ever felt the Apple/Microsoft charger to be lacking in some way? Breaking easily, too long cords, too short, wrong color, too expensive?

No not really. In fact I’ve found most third-party products to be godawful. Good luck not buying something fraudulent on Amazon.com. But also, I’m not really sure what you are talking about. Companies sell charging equipment and cords now anyway.

Everything has trade-offs. I’m skeptical of the necessity of this regulation, especially given that the only holdout that anyone cares about is Apple and they’ve been adopting USB-C in all of their products over time. One benefit though will be manufacturers won’t include charging cables with new devices anymore. So that will further reduce waste. Wouldn’t be surprised to see lobbying behind the scenes from companies such as Apple to implement regulations like this so they can save money. I kind of like this as an investor because now you can save money by not including a cable (or maybe you still do and it’s just some cheap one for now) and then you go and up sell wireless chargers instead.

We can copy the US if the cable freedom gives birth to superior cables on the long run. EU stuff is't written on stone, it changes as it needs to.

I guess In Europe we kind of like the idea of being able to overthrow the people in power if they screw us too much. It's much more socially acceptable to burn cars and occupy streets and decapitate politicians than shooting CEO's when you are really not happy with the way things work. It feels like you have control over the stuff going on in your country.

You’re really ignoring the amount of inertia that a deployed fleet of cars creates. You can’t just change standards with the snap of a finger once there are 10M cars in the field with it, once that happens, you’re stuck with that standard for probably decades, as the downsides of changing it become much more acute than the potential upsides.

If the US comes up with the superior cables, EU will simply allow it be optional and the industry will retrofit as needed.

Europe is very old, we are used to have old stuff laying around. Old building that definitely don't meet the modern requirements are everywhere. Besides, the states with Cable Freedom will also have all the obsolate cables when the industry finally comes up with the perfect cable.

> Europe is very old, we are used to have old stuff laying around.

So what's the problem with allowing lightning to exist, since as a standard it predated USB-C (and in fact was the impetus for the creation of the latter)? If we allow neighborhoods to keep their old power connectors without retrofit... why not allow lightning to continue to exist?

There's a difference between allowing old installations to continue existing and allowing mass manufacture of the old standard indefinitely. This legislation isn't going to touch anyone's old phones.

All aside, it’s pretending ‘we’ as civilians have any kind of influence in what the EU does. In reality it’s just an opaque process ran by politicians where 99% of the electorate has no idea whatsoever how they got there or even what party they belong to.

> In the long term however competition between these different standards will cause consolidation and overall technology improvement.

If you think that’s a superior solution, then the regulation should actually support it: require that all EV charging connectors have a free published specification, disallow patents on them, and require that interoperability be permitted without cost or other penalty. (e.g. anyone should be able to implement both ends of the Tesla supercharging protocol such that Tesla’s chargers would charge a competing car at the same prices that they charge Tesla’s; similarly, a competing charger should be able to charge a Tesla.)

I was set to be all libertarian about this, but your suggestion is probably more level headed.

There should be some common ground. Regulations that encourage innovation (perhaps even with timed financial incentives) while also ensuring that the best ideas are eventually freely adoptable across the board.

Seems like, as with most issues, people take one extreme or the other, when a common sense middle ground could be found with proper planning and forethought.

> I was set to be all libertarian about this…

Disallowing patents is the libertarian solution, though it would be up to the customers to demand published specifications and official support for interoperability.

The original intention of patent system was to encourage open publication of inventions. It even still works that way for some verticals. The issue is that it also produced a system that it is profitable to game and thus there are patent attorneys who get by by writing the patent in as vague terms as is possible to pass by patent reviewers, and in these kind of adversarial situations it is quite obvious that the private sector will win over the government bureaucrats.

> The original intention of patent system was to encourage open publication of inventions.

That is how it was sold to the public. Unfortunately the system was never designed with the proper structure and incentives to ensure that patents were only granted when doing so actually resulted in the publication of accurate details about useful inventions which would not have become known to the public anyway well before the patent period expired.

In practice, if you think you can keep something a trade secret for more than 20 years without it being independently reinvented you'll do that and not file for a patent. Patents are thus useful only in those cases where a patent is expected to be worse for the public than a trade secret, as they inhibit independent reinvention and reverse engineering for the duration of the patent.

I'm not opposed to this and personally think it's all up for discussion/debate and it should be discussed and debated. I'm excited to see what develops in this space.

One nitpick would be:

> e.g. anyone should be able to implement both ends of the Tesla supercharging protocol such that Tesla’s chargers would charge a competing car at the same prices that they charge Tesla’s; similarly, a competing chargers should be able to charge a Tesla.

I think this sounds good, but one of the details here is ensuring that other manufacturers are able to actually build the products correctly so a supercharger doesn't light a car on fire or something due to faulty equipment. Who is at fault? How is it prevented? What are the legal agreements? Etc.

On the pricing side though I'd have to strongly disagree. Tesla (or whoever) builds the infrastructure so they should be able to charge what they want. It's about the plug and interoperability of that standard, not infringing on the business model which I think goes too far. If they charge too much money, people won't use them and competitors will continue to emerge (I see new charging stations in Meijer parking lots being put next to Tesla infrastructure). There's no reason in my view to mandate pricing here and I think it would set back EV adoption to do so.