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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Why would that be a problem at all? If a significant advance in charging connectors is made, they can simply amend the law.

These laws don't say you can't make better chargers, they say if you make a mass produced device from the provided categories and it's going to charge by cable you will need to make sure that it has at least one USB-C charging port.

Besides, this is only in EU(and India now). Sure, there's a Brussels effect but as you can see even with iPhone the companies can have multiple versions of a product. US iPhones don't have physical SIM cards anymore, the other have it. So if it happens that Apple invents significantly better charging port for the iPhone, they can sell those everywhere else in the world and EU can revisit the laws if there's an interest.

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>If a significant advance in charging connectors is made, they can simply amend the law.

How would the makers of these laws know this? How would you determine the quality of a connector if you do not have benchmarks like manufacturer adoption, market demand, longevity in the field?

What will effectively happen is that the USB implementers forum will become a state(s) sponsored organization with a monopoly on defining charging connectors. They will not have any competition, because any company which might want to compete has to first comvince the government(s) that their standard is superior, without being allowed to roll it out.

They can see this great new hypothetical charging port during their trip to the USA, the land of cable freedom.

About land of freedom, in some states its illegal to collect rainwater that falls on your house. Thats because there is is 'freedom' to sell water rights. (if I have that correct). So freedom is also unfreedom.

That is something of a mindfuck for the rest of the world.

> If a significant advance in charging connectors is made, they can simply amend the law.

Also, I'm not sure what the Indian law says, but at least the EU version actually requires review of current technologies every 5 years.

> Why would that be a problem at all? If a significant advance in charging connectors is made, they can simply amend the law.

The problem is if the law of 1 country is not amended then you have fragmentation. What does apple do? Change for 1 country and be fined in another? Not release in some countries? Have different devices?

EU is like %5 of the world population. Sure, it's a wealthier %5 but companies have different product lines all the time.

This year the US iPhone doesn't have a physical SIM tray. So if EU acts slow on adopting this amazing new charging port, the Americans and Japanese can have it and EU can wait.

It doesn't make much sense to keep having fragmentation now so that we don't risk a fragmentation in the future.

> The problem is if the law of 1 country is not amended then you have fragmentation. What does apple do?

The Planet is a big place, the idea that could even produce one product for the entire world would be crazy for most of human history.

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