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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I'm always confused when I see someone talking about laws and regulations as something you can't change.

Care to explain why? If in the land of cable freedoms they come up with something noticeably better, they can just change the law to allow it.

Am I missing something?

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Legislatures have limited bandwidth and they tend to consider a topic "closed" once they have passed a law. So flawed laws often stick around for decades.

That's why laws are written in broad strokes and redirect exact specification to regulations written by regulatory committees, at least in Continental Europe (i.e. Civil Law system). You don't need to make new laws just update regulatory text.

Regulations to address the ambiguities and gaps in legislation, or to update them within specifically legislated boundaries, happen often in common-law systems too.

The problem is that those regulatory committees always put some kind of idealistic nonplus ultra standards into the regulations without respecting the real world.

"Sorry kids, no kindergarden here for you because the regulator requires us to build parking space for SUVs and obeying this means we can't build enough parking space for all your parents which would break another rule. So we'll do nothing."

And what are the "idealistic nonplus ultra standards" in the concrete USB-C example we're discussing?

Parent was discussing systematic issues and I was answering to that. In fact, what I'm getting downvoted for (the problem of outsourced over-engineered regulations that frequently contradict each other) is openly discussed, at least in Germany.

Maybe you should check yourself in "seeing anti Europeans everywhere".

Sure, but here we have a concrete example of a regulatory committee making a rule that apparently doesn't do what you fear. So it seems like it's certainly possible for regulatory committees not to do what you described?

I get your point, but painting with such broad strokes honestly just poisons the discussion. If you're rejecting everything on principle by applying a slippery slope, why should people care about your position?

Lastly, I'm not sure I understand what "seeing anti Europeans everywhere" you're talking about, could you expand on that?

Parking minima are a distinctly American phenomenon.

Not at all. E.g. Germany requires housing projects to build "enough parking lots" for newly built flats[0]. The result is that flats either don't get built at all or "green surfaces" (or playgrounds) get transformed into parking lots.

So the _real world_ result is, as a society, we favor parking lots over homelessness or green surfaces which is contradictory to pretty much everything else we're discussing. These laws are from times in which the legislator thought of them to be a good idea. Times have changed, the regulation hasn't and nobody is talking about exactly those issues. There's plenty more of those examples which can only lead you to the conclusion that most finely granular regulation is rather harmful than helpful.

[0] https://dejure.org/gesetze/LBO/37.html (German, it might be different from federal state to state)

Of course these get revisited (e.g. here[0] for your example) but in the case of parking spots there‘s a sizable pro-car lobby.

0: https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.landesbauordnung-b...

It is more that they never get around to addressing many of them, as legislators/regulators have limited bandwidth. Tons of things just fall off the wagon.

So how would anyone prove that its “noticeably better” while not being allowed to use that standard on any device?

People keep repeating the same thing but it just makes no sense..

Just stupid Americans saying Stupid American stuff.

Lightning is already better than USB C, and yet a new law has been passed banning it.

For definitions of "better" that don't consider its being proprietary, perhaps.

Yes, indeed, some things about it are better and some worse. Which means it’s good for consumers to have a choice, and more importantly, for companies with a track record of good taste in designing high-quality smartphones to have a free hand.

I trust Apple to make decisions that lead to a phone I enjoy using a lot more than I trust the EU regulatory bureaucracy to do so.

Consumers don't have a choice, though. Up until recently, if you wanted an iPhone, you get Lightning, and that's it. That's great for you, since you believe it's the best cable/connector for you. But if someone wanted something different, they had no choice, unless they wanted a different kind of smartphone. And I don't think someone is going to make an iPhone -> Android switch simply because of the cable. That's a bit absurd.

Lightning is worse to the point where it isn't even funny

  - 480Mb/s vs 120Gb/s data transfer
  - 9V? vs 48V
  - 2.4A? vs 5A
  - resulting in 18W vs 240W
  - proprietary vs open.

Youre calling the connector supporting 13.3x the power and 250x data transfer while being an open standard and almost the same size "worse".

What makes it better? Last I checked, the specs were objectively worse.

It's entirely legal to add a Lightning port to a device. Why do you think that was "banned"?

There are a lot of laws and not all of them get updated, as regulatory bodies only have so much time, attention, and political capital. The EU's cookie law still requires a banner if your site uses a cookie to store something like preferred language or default location (even if it's not tied to a specific identity), as those aren't considered "strictly necessary" cookies. GDPR's right to be forgotten hasn't been updated to stop abuse by people who want to hide their past crimes or controversial behavior. The EU's laws on self-driving vehicles still restrict maximum lateral acceleration and lane change behavior, forcing vehicle manufacturers to gimp their software in the EU.

The new USB-C law could be improved significantly if it was a tax instead of a mandate. There is a dollar value associated with the cost of recycling proprietary chargers. Taxing that would be a source of revenue for the EU and allow other chargers for purposes that we can't predict today. The current law is purely a cost center for both governments and manufacturers. And since everyone agrees it will need to be updated at some point, it's the law equivalent of tech debt.

I'm surprised at the responses I've gotten considering how I didn't say I was against this law. I just said I'm not sure if it's a good idea in the long term. And so far, the replies haven't engaged with most of my points. The EU's mandate helps big companies at the expense of small ones, does nothing to discourage electronic waste unrelated to chargers, and makes it harder to switch to whatever will come after USB-C. Yes it's possible for the EU to change the law, but considering they've started with a flawed law and they haven't updated quite a few other laws, I would bet against this law getting updated promptly.

>The EU's cookie law still requires a banner if your site uses a cookie to store something like preferred language or default location (even if it's not tied to a specific identity), as those aren't considered "strictly necessary" cookies.

This simply isn't true, and your source for this is biased as another commenter has stated.

The EU website has the exact legal definitions:

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...

I'm happy to be corrected on this, but your source says nothing about the kind of cookies I mentioned. Examples of strictly necessary cookies are auth sessions and shopping cart contents, not preferred language or default location. Paragraph 25 of the law states[1]:

> Where such devices, for instance cookies, are intended for a legitimate purpose, such as to facilitate the provision of information society services, their use should be allowed on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC about the purposes of cookies or similar devices so as to ensure that users are made aware of information being placed on the terminal equipment they are using. Users should have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored on their terminal equipment.

Is storing preferred language or default location strictly necessary, or just a legitimate purpose (and thus requires consent)? The EU has had since 2009 to clarify this, but many sites (including the news article about the USB-C law) interpret it to mean that consent is required, and thus have cookie banners for these things.

If you can't agree that the cookie law is a bad law that either needs to be repealed, clarified, or made more strict, then I don't know what to tell you. It's a perfect example of a well-intended law that causes more problems than it solves. And it's a perfect example of the EU failing to update a law with clear flaws. I don't know if the USB-C law will have a similar outcome, but considering the EU's track record, I'm not confident it will be a good thing in the long term.

1. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...

> The EU has had since 2009 to clarify this

They did, back in 2012. See point 3.6 here: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...

More recently, see point 49 here (in French): https://www.cnil.fr/sites/cnil/files/atoms/files/lignes_dire...

Section 3.6 specifically says that you need a cookie consent notice if you save preferred language for more than one session (a few hours).

It says that simply telling the user that the language setting uses a cookie is enough to obtain consent in this case. Not that you need a full blown banner. The CNIL even says you don't need consent to do it.

You’re missing a thing called regulatory capture.

1) no one will invest in new charging technology because it’s an uphill battle to be approved

2) entrenched charger organizations with political connections will resist change. Their existence depends on it. You will only see change as they use regulations to starve upstarts and acquire their tech Pennie’s on the dollar.

But the good news is Europe invents almost nothing today so they can just have a friendly debate on which American or Asian tech to standardize on.

What Europe does is to educate talent, then that talent goes to America and works hard. Then their inventions come to Europe to get standardized. Meanwhile, Europe is making good money by investing in America, without the mess of being an experimental zone.

Notice how there are barely any names like John or Henry on those research papers or patents. It’s even a hot topic lately, acknowledged by the tech titans. As they say, Americans don’t do much and even if the legal entity is in the US, the capital and the talent is actually from Europe, China and India.

Unfortunately, it appears that with the rise of Maga Europe will eventually have to provide its talent a place to experiment things but the techies are fighting hard to prevent that.

This is a pretty obvious and desperate attempt to comfort yourself. Take the intellectually honest road and question why Europe (I’m European myself) has gotten itself into this sorry state and then try to do something about it.

In what way is Europe not in the mess of the experiment that is AI? It seems to me that it has all the exact same problems, without any of the benefits (the jobs, experience and money) that comes with it.

What you are claiming is as dumb as saying that Europe fixed climate change by blocking drilling in Europe and buying oil and gas from the Saudis instead.

It's just a swing into a recent hot topic and talking points around it, don't read too much into it. Everybody knows that US and EU are both way behind Asia and this EU is lagging behind USA due to regulations is just a meme, not more relevant than if Poutine is healthier than french fries.

Ok I won’t read too much into it. That said, I think every responsible European and especially parent has a duty to take problems seriously.

The problem is misrepresented in online discussion. For example, typical argument is that EU doesn't have TOP10 companies by market cap and US has half of it but when you think about it market cap doesn't mean much and even if it did it would have ment capital concentration which is not a good thing by European culture. We don't want to have some ultra rich giant companies when everyone else tries to survive by the scraps, we actively try to redistribute wealth and are proud of our better gini coefficient. Europe is so not into this stuff that the "startup guys" of Europe on social media who are raving for accelerationism are just small businesses with a revenue of a restaurant on a high street but they think that they are early stages of Musk or Bezos. They just don't get it.

IMHO just look at the stuff you care about and forget using proxies like GDP or market value etc. For example, US has the largest companies by market cap but they are excited to have Taiwan opening a plant in USA that will produce chips on a few years old tech when Taiwan and Korea have the cutting edge stuff.

Examples are numerous, it goes above and beyond everything. China is not behind US in AI, in fact in some areas US is already trying to catch up. Tesla has enormous market cap but Chinese brands already displaced them in actual product sales. Americans think that self driving cars will be ready to go mainstream soon when China already has those disrupting their taxi sector. Apple is about to become $4T company but Chinese and Koreans have all the cutting edge tech and Apple is faltering.

In military front USA boosts about how much money they spend on military only to find out that they are just paying more than they should and can't match Russia on ammunition.

While I may disagree on the overall trajectory and importance of some of these topics. I really appreciate your response, in spite of my semi-aggressive earlier responses.

I think it’s false to think that the value of these companies is just their salary. It’s about experience. Many of today’s businesses exist because their founders were given the chance to gain experience somewhere else. I can’t expect the next Volkswagen to come from a country where entrepreneurship is constrained to starting a bistro.

Oh don't worry about it, I haven't perceived as that aggressive.

> We don't want to have some ultra rich giant companies when everyone else tries to survive by the scraps,

So we’d rather have nothing at all?

The extremely low salaries for tech workers is one of the best indicators. There is just not enough demand in Europe because there is no growth and very few companies doing anything innovative.

> capital concentration which is not a good thing by European culture.

Higher disposable incomes are also bot good for European culture, right?

> Europe is making good money by investing in America

Except it’s not. The gap had been continuously growing for the last 10-20 years. Europeans are just getting (relatively) poorer and poorer.

Europe doesn’t matter. At all. It’s a dying and increasingly irrelevant place. Sorry but true.

Look who was consuming propaganda on Twitter all day :)

Europe had 0 growth 2 years in a row and is in the middle of a second lost decade. Couple that with the replacement rate. Demographics are destiny. It’s over sadly. Had a good run.

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