Smartphone OSes have propogated their own curated walled-garden app stores, and then the desktop OS vendors follow suit. Soon it will simply not be possible to install unsigned, uncertified software on your computer, and that will be the end of GPC.
Microsoft Windows has had that for a while. It's called "Windows S".[1] Only software from the Microsoft store can be installed.
The lowest price laptops from Walmart run Windows S.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-and-w...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...
Sometimes. For now. Machines in enterprise and school environments often have that option locked out.
I cannot fathom how Americans can point at the EU successfully forcing phone manufacturers to switch from 40 different types of proprietary chargers (we used to have different chargers for different models within a phone series ffs) to 1 and say “wow fuck the EU for taking away the freedom that obligated me to have a dedicated charging drawer”. That is the true mental gymnastics.
Same with privacy. What sane human thinks “yes please, farm, process and store into perpetuity all the intimate data points of my life”..
I'm mostly concerned about it locking out the development of new standards that aren't USB, even if that was an unlikely development anyway.
That's because, not in spite of the measures taken by the EU, which happened quite a long time ago.