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Comment by realo | Hacker News Reader

Well... if you look behind anything that plugs into a wall socket you will see that it has ( among many other things) a CE mark. Even things in the USofA have a CE mark.

If your new product cannot have its CE mark for whatever reason, you will not have the approbations to sell in the USA either.

What the CRA will do, is if you do not have a "CRA" compliant product, you will not have the CE mark. Which means you will not (with very high probability) have the other marks needed to sell outside Europe.

Maybe then you can just sell to your close family members who like you, but good luck if you get caught and it can be proven that your shitty device caused a fire ...

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We don't place any value on the CE mark in the States.

A lot of consumer electronics need to be FCC compliant, which involves a process of proving that the device doesn't emit too much of the wrong EMI/RFI in the wrong places.

And safety-wise, we use tend to use ETL, UL, and CSA for testing. These are third-party Nationally Recognized Testing Labs, and their own marks are used on devices they approve. But they're only really concerned about the safety of a product. In very broad strokes: If the device is proven to be unlikely-enough to burn a house down or cause electrical shock to humans, then it gets approved.

CE is a whole different thing. No government body in the USA requires or respects a CE mark on consumer goods; that mark doesn't hold any legal weight here.

Whether good or bad, CE is just not how we roll on this side of the pond.

(Of course, none of that means that laws in the EU don't affect product availability and features here. Globalization be that way sometimes.)

Oh. Sorry. I work for a rather large company that sells globally. In our business unit we always considered the CE mark mandatory.

I understand your point though. Of course a US company that is only ever going to sell in the US does not need to bother with international marks.

I'd like to reiterate that a CE mark means nothing to us here.

If my house burns down and a widget with only a CE mark is blamed as the source, my insurance company will consider that to be the equivalent of it having no marking at all.

If a company wants to sell a product globally including the USA, then CE isn't enough to satisfy the safety boffins.

The world is a big place, and the US isn't alone in this way: Lots of other countries also don't care about an isolated CE mark, like Canada and Mexico here in North America.

Some other large, important markets like Japan and Brazil are this way, too.

Acceptance of CE is not universal.

Well... I live in Canada and I have never seen any "modern" electronics around me that does not have the CE mark.

Even things ordered directly from China have a CE mark!

I guess you have never really visited Canada and looked at the marks on the things you use.

And it kind of removes value from your opinion about the other countries of the world. Sorry.

That's not what they're saying. They're saying that in the US, a device can have the CE mark, but that's not indicative of it passing US safety standards.

Also, I'd be surprised if all those Chinese devices have actually earned that CE mark.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that a device sold anywhere in the world can't have a CE mark -- that's not it, at all. I'm also not saying that a person or company can't seek to get a CE mark for their product from wherever they are in the world (they certainly can do that).

There's a lot that I'm not saying.

What I am saying is that there are places in the world where the CE mark (and the presence or absence of it) means nothing, and that Canada is one such place.

Y'all have your own safety marks up there.

CSA is a big one -- you've had that organization up there and doing great work for over a century. cUL is another very common, accepted mark in Canada.

There are many more. Here's the list: https://scc-ccn.ca/resources/publications/recognized-canadia...

But, again: The Standards Council of Canada doesn't recognize the CE mark for devices used in Canada. That's not a thing that they do.

>If your new product cannot have its CE mark for whatever reason, you will not have the approbations to sell in the USA either.

I worked for a US manufacturer that only sold directly in the US, and we never bothered getting CE certification on anything, just FCC. Lots of Europeans imported our products, but we left EU compliance up to them.

The size of the EU market didn't justify the costs of regulatory compliance.

> Lots of Europeans imported our products, but we left EU compliance up to them.

Yeah, compliance is almost voluntary unless you're absolutely huge.

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