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Comment by serbuvlad | Hacker News Reader

Once again, the EU coming 30 years later to do something everyone else is doing, and everyone will credit them for some odd reason.

In the 90s, there were dozens (hundreds?) of phone charging ports. A couple of years ago, there were only two. The dozens -> 2 simplifications occurred on the purely free market. And the EU mandated a simplification from 2 -> 1 and gets the credit for the entire simplification.

What is the point of this license? Either the GPL is invalid in the EU, in which case why aren't companies moving to the EU to infringe on the GPL? Or it is valid, in which case a a bunch of EU lawyers were given a bunch of MY money to do nothing of value to anyone.

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Whenever something from the EU emerges on HN, whatever that is, a comment exactly like yours is made.

Today it's you, tomorrow someone else.

Always the same "points" and the poster always seems to feel obliged to bring their own misshapen view of history, forgetting that a lot of good changes in this so-called "free market" happened because of the EU.

Sure more tech became popular out of the US but let's not be blinded:

1. This tech isn't/wasn't the only innovative tech ever created

2. A lot of reasons for the popularity has to do with US position over the rest of the world

3. That this same tech has been kept at bay because of the US

I'm not saying the EU is perfect but I prefer its direction over the US, especially when it comes to making legislations which benefits the people rather than multinational corporations.

I simply do not think that the popularity of US tech is due to anything other than the quality of US tech.

I live in Romania, and the people that were rushing to pirate Windows in the 90's after communism fell because they couldn't afford licensing weren't doing so because of any US imposition, but simply because they wanted to use personal computers, and Windows was the best OS for most people at the time for that purpose.

Just like when phones came around they rushed to buy Nokia phones; when smartphones came around they rushed to buy Samsung phones; when they wanted DLSRs they bought Canon and Nikon cameras and now that they want easily transferable digital cash and cheap tech trinkets they opened up Revolut accounts and order stuff off Temu.

Not because of any "influence" or "position" of Finland, South Korea, Japan, the UK or China, but simply because they are the best offer on the market as perceived by consumers.

What tech does Europe lead in? To be fair there are still some fields, like Aerospace (Airbus), Lithography (ASML) or Pharmaceutics (BioNTech). But on the consumer tech market, the phones, laptops and streaming services people want? The EU has no presence. Even the auto industry is going to be eaten up by China, because Europe simply pivoted too late to EVs. I know someone who works at Renault and they're just terrified of the cars that are coming out of China.

> But on the consumer tech market, the phones, laptops and streaming services people want? The EU has no presence.

I'm working on it, give me another ten years <3

> quality of

More like ability to buy competition.

I see your point but that stops being true once the bigger companies start stifling competition (both locally and internationally) to become even bigger and more pervasive.

There are European alternatives for many products/services that are currently US-based but they either don't have the same marketing budgets, or international reach or can offer lower prices. All those are often due to first-to-market tied with anti-competitive practices (further tied to governments not having much power against these organisations) which makes these companies move even more to the top. None of that was about better tech but rather everything else.

And sometimes yes, better tech, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that "better tech" is not somehow tied to more money available to spend on improving such tech. Big capitals being moved around the US has an impact to this tech.

By the way, there are European alternatives Amazon (just not big enough to be international, but many countries have their own version), Microsoft (i.e. Linux), Google (ProtonMail/ProtonDrive , Nextcloud, etc.), AWS (the ones which comes to mind are Upcloud and Hetzner), Android/iOS (Ubuntu Touch)

> The dozens -> 2 simplifications occurred on the purely free market.

That was also done by the European Commission[0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply

That was not done by the European Commission. It was a document with no legal power. And it was an acknowledgment of an existing market trend. non-iPhones had already began converging on USB charging (including mini-USB and micro-USB) in the years before.

By the time the EU actually first proposed regulation on the matter, which was only in 2020, there were in effect three ports on the phone market: the Apple Lightning was still used in iPhones, and the rest of the market was undergoing an orderly migration from the cheaper micro-USB port, to the more expensive but better USB-C port.

So yes, the free market was entirely responsible for transitioning from dozens of ports to 3 ports, and would have very likely eventually transitioned to 2 ports. The fact that the EU made recommendation to that effect years ago after the trend had begun that was purely voluntary is an entirely irrelevant datum.

That's not really what happened. The European Commission made gave the manufacturers a choice: they could sit down and come up with standard that they voluntarily accepted to follow or the EC could write the standard and force the manufacturers to follow it [1].

I imagine they would have eventually converged on USB anyway, but when the upcoming rules (or "rules") were announced, you definitely could not count on being able to charge your phone using anyone else's charger (or one of the many that had come with your previous phones).

Counterfactuals are tricky, and we'll never know for sure what might have been, but seeing laptop manufacturers dragging their feet, I really can't see how you could feel so certain that the market would have fixed the mess that existed just as quickly.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1... (search for "ultimatum"

This is how good legislation works.

Good legislators let it be known that a situation is unacceptable and that legislation is coming.

Good companies respond to that and start to align with the legislation.

When the legislation becomes law - no one is shocked or surprised or caught out.

EUPL almost 19 years old (first published in Jan 2007).

I don't think you actually know the history.

... Eh? It's from 2007. Licenses like this weren't at all common at the time; there was the original Affero license, but AGPLv3, the first version to see widespread use, didn't come out until later.

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