Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.
The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.
And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.
https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...
The green deal stuff seems to be pretty bad. Manufacturing seems to have a hard time. The next tier economy, e.g. AI, is not seen on the horizon. Over-the-top regulations for agriculture and then opening up the market from goods where such regulations don't exist does not seem smart either.
And there're lots and lots of small things like those.
For example, solar. Shit ton of euromoneys is poured into subsidies. But those subsidies are not geofenced. Thus vast majority of people go for chinese stuff. It could have been much better to subsidise locally produced components only. Then price would be +/- the same.
Now chinese components are dirt cheap with all the subsidies. I myself went for chinese components, because break-even period was like 5 vs 10 years. I'll just pihole the inverter from calling home once I figure out how to get some statistics without the manufacturer's app.
I guess some people decided it's better to get 2-3x more solar installed power ASAP rather than prop up the local solar industry.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require...
> The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too
I'm to afraid of the f'ing EU to mention specific names here... But maybe some braver souls will
Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
We know how trustable ai outputs are, and now govts' are ready to let the AI's control their people?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-po...
Edit: this in no way should be read to condone Denmark’s position here.
Whatever we call centre-left today we would have placed much further to right a couple decades ago. At this point even the US Democrats are more progressive than our EU "liberal" parties.
Axis 1 - civil & political rights: In favour of broad social & political rights (down) -> In favour of few social and political rights a.k.a. authoritarianism (up) Axis 2 - economy: In favour of social responsibility / society ensuring people's needs are met (in the sense of 'from each according to ability, and to each according to need') (left) -> In favour of individual responsibility and a laissez faire economic freedoms (right).
On this 2d view, Social Democrats are nominally lower left, while Chat Control is an authoritarian policy (i.e. appealing to anyone on the top half of the coordinate system), so it would run counter to their nominal values.
Note that there is a significant number of the economic left who are nominally authoritarian (see for example Stalinist / Maoists), and likewise for the right so it doesn't make sense to project that as a left/right thing.
A multifactor values-based approach better maps niche positions and explains why there are often irreconcilable disagreements among large blocs that are otherwise compatible. For instance, there will always be recurring tensions between progressives and leftcoms despite their neighboring positions on the 4-quadrant political compass. And right-wing secular monarchists don’t really get along with theocrats either.
Hungary is often called out as a black sheep but Denmark is a wolf in sheep's clothes.
Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?
Which is why the whole idea of political parties is the main travesty of the fake democracy they promote to enforce their own goals over population.
Chat Control is being pushed by member states. The people who keep saving you are the MEPs (elected EU MPs).
You would most likely already have chat control if you were not in the EU. All governments around the world are pushing for this.
Europe without EU isn’t democracy, it’s a bunch of fiefdoms.
Peace in Europe. You have to remember that the EU is fundamentally the world's most successful peace project, founded after the horrors of WW2 to make war in Europe not just unthinkable, but materially impossible.
Before the EU, we had centuries of constantly being at each others throats. There hasn't been armed conflict between EU members and there won't be for as long as it exists. It worked. It broke the cycle of generation after generation of horrible slaughter.
Chat Control is obviously bad. But fundamentally, the good of peace outweighs even that.
However, one should also note that Chat Control is pushed by the member states and their representatives - the EU is actually the institution that's kept it at bay so far.
You're confusing the EU with NATO. Germany is already planning on re-arming[^1] because NATO is dead. The EU is by all means an unfinished project and if I had to bet, I would bet that it won't survive the next two decades. There's no pro-EU majority in any European country right now. Not one. It's a great idea, very poorly implement that gets (some times unfairly, some times fairly) all the blame for everything wrong with Europe right now. Migration, energy, housing, etc.
[1^]: https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2026/04/22/germany...
I am not. See the Schuman Declaration [0] for context on why the EU came to be.
> It proposes that Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe. The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe, and will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims.
> The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible. The setting up of this powerful productive unit, open to all countries willing to take part and bound ultimately to provide all the member countries with the basic elements of industrial production on the same terms, will lay a true foundation for their economic unification.
> There's no pro-EU majority in any European country right now. Not one.
That couldn't be further from the truth.
* Pew Research, May 2026: Majorities in eight of the 10 countries (surveyed) currently have a positive opinion of the EU. [1]
* Gallup, March 2025: No country approves of their own leadership, or that of U.S., over the EU [2]
[0] https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/05/28/in-severa...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/657860/member-states-show-stron...
All the referendums I can recall (French and Dutch in 00s, Italian recently, Greek and British) were all resounding “No”’s… plus the rise of the far right is kinda hard to miss…
> Gallup, March 2025: No country approves of their own leadership, or that of U.S., over the EU [2]
That’s literally insane. I don’t believe it. I have yet to find someone who is fond of the EU leadership. lol. …
That peace in Europe didn't start because of the EU, it started because western Europe was conquered by the US and eastern Europe by USSR so they were a bit too incapacitated to fight each other under those conditions and given the much bigger issues they had at the time.
You give the EU too much credit for peace. In fact, there's way more tensions between EU countries now as EU members than in the past. Poland even went to buy weapons from Korea and build them on-shore because they don't trust buying weapons from France and Germany. Just because EU countries aren't slaughtering each other, doesn't mean they like or trust each other.
Yes, THanks to the US military occupation
The EU is pushing the member countries e.g. regarding climate change. Not that it is enough, but it is something.
Also the EU tries to do some privacy stuff, antitrust (when it doesn't get bullied by the US), etc.
I feel like ChatControl is really about some lobbyists making a lot of noise and politicians not competent to understand how cryptography works. People say "that's because the ruling class wants surveillance over the citizens", but I believe it's incompetence. Just like the "ruling class" doesn't want to screw humanity by not addressing climate change and the current mass extinction: they are just not competent enough to understand the problem.
And that's the reflection of the people who elect them. Go in the street and ask random people what they understand about E2EE. In good approximation, they have no idea how it works. Worse: they don't give a damn. How would they elect people who are competent about it?
Is it enough to turn me anti-EU? I don't know yet. But I certainly would be on the fence instead of a proponent as I am now.
The current age verification laws are already pushing me in that direction and also the weakening of GDPR and DMA/DSA under American pressure.
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.
>> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
You could probably argue self-hosted, privacy-preserving analytics is a "legitimate business purpose" so doesn't need consent. AFAIK it's because you're sending user data to Google that you normally need consent for GA.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
> This could be solved on the client side
GDPR legally prohibits tracking in general, not cookies specifically. Advertisers use fingerprinting more than cookies these days already, even if browsers removed cookie support altogether it wouldn't change anything.
I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?
The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.
No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.
Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.
I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
(Not the person you replied to)
I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it.
The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening.
Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this?
That is the law at work.
Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked.
If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.
> That is the law at work.
The problem is that's not what anybody, including the users, want. Nobody cares that browsers have cookies as an implementation detail. It's a ridiculous thing to use as the basis of a privacy rule. Does the user care that the site uses cookies to implement a shopping cart feature? Does the user not care that the site is tracking them without cookies using device fingerprinting? Cookies were never the problem.
On top of that, they were the thing the users already had control over. Browsers allow you to delete or reject cookies, provide private browsing modes that don't submit them, etc.
Meanwhile the things that would actually be useful, like prohibiting services from requiring the user to provide a phone number (a de facto cross-service cross-device tracking ID) in order use the service, or requiring device attestation (which uniquely identifies the device), are left unaddressed.
You pass a law prohibiting any entity from conditioning the use of their service on the user providing them with a phone number. Even services that actually use SMS or voice calls are required to provide an alternative like email or the web with no reduction in functionality and for no additional cost.
You pass a law stating that any device which is sold or leased to anyone who takes physical possession of it cannot contain a private key the customer is unable to both read and extricate at no cost.
What does malicious compliance look like there? Anyone can give them an email instead of a phone number and if that doesn't work they're in violation. Remote attestation is the only reason for devices to come from the factory containing an inaccessible private key, which is thereby prohibited and unable to be used as a tracking ID.
Aha ok, so your judgement of an entire governmental apparatus, trying to influence and predict millions of people in hundreds of thousands of companies and across hundreds of industries, from the most sensitive to the most frivolous of activities, can be summarized in a one liner.
Don't you think these people got advice from people like you? Do you think you are smarter than whatever panel of experts was involved? Do you think maybe the panel of experts was confronted with some information that you do not have? Do you think maybe something you value was in conflict with something somebody else values?
I really cannot express how unlikely it is that you are right.
You want the winner to be the side with more expensive lawyers who use psychological manipulation techniques against a jury?
In general juries are the finders of fact. They decide what happened, e.g. who is lying. Judges decide the law, i.e. whether the thing the jury says they did is a violation of the law.
What you're asking for is to have the jury decide what the law is. There are a lot of problems with that, but one of the big ones is that jury determinations don't have to follow precedent and, unless you want judges ultimately deciding it anyway, can't really be appealed. Which would result in zillions of spurious lawsuits against innocent people because a small percentage of them would win big at random.
Opting out of cookies does not mean no tracking. Tracking companies moved away from cookies a decade ago and now fingerprint the browser through JS in very subtle ways.
You should just assume that anything that your browser exposed may be used to track you. The real problem is that most browsers and browser configurations are far too permissive for the sake of avoiding breakage. The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical, and only allowing for very limited and coarse measurement of client-side user interaction.
As long as the web is an applications platform rather a hypertext document platform there will always be enough small differences to fingerprint. There is never going to be a technical solution, the solution is going to have to be social (legal, e.g. the GDPR).
Because the USA tends to privilege corporations over people whereas in the EU it's more balanced (still pretty biased towards corps, though), and I am a people, not a corporations.
Take, for example, the 'cookie law': I much prefer being annoyed by the cookie pop-up over websites shoving a ton of unnecessary and unwanted cookies onto my computer without permission.
...speaking of which:
> and their failures in regulating the Internet
Which political entity would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet? Where are citizens most protected from being inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams, and all the other garbage one is normally subjected to when not putting in some amount of effort in combating that shit?
> would you say has done the best job in regulating the Internet
So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
> false news
For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about this (I’m not sure they even tried doing anything that directly addressed it?)
No. Where do you even come up with this stuff?
> So again.. how do these basic/superficial (or even if they are extremely effective and useful, that doesn’t really change anything) regulations justify mass surveillance?
Answering a question with a question only works if the question used as answer is a simpler way of getting the answer to the original question.
> For what its worth in no way has the EU been effective in doing anything about [fake news]
Okay, so which country/state/union/whatever has been effective in doing anything about it? Because according to the post I responded to there is someone way better at regulating the Internet than the EU is, so I'm wondering who it is.
inundated with advertising, unwanted cookies, unnecessary JavaScript, false news, scams,
Also:
> I’d rather have that instead of govt monitoring of all communications.
False dilemma, you can have neither. But sure, EU bad because you're not allowed to deny the Holocaust or call for the extermination of Jews/Muslims/the gays/...
Your argument is that voting with your wallet doesn't change things even if it reduces the profits of the company by an amount proportional to the number of people who do it, but voting in an election does where not only is your vote is still diluted by millions of other people, the result is all-or-nothing and the party/candidate doing the thing you didn't like can still retain full control of the government even after losing a couple percent of the vote?
It's the same problem in both cases. What you need is enough viable alternatives that you can pick the one doing the right thing instead of being given a fake choice between two or three "alternatives" that are all doing the wrong thing. And markets with hundreds of competitors are a lot more common than elections with hundreds of candidates/parties on the ballot.
One big thing you need a government to actually do is break up consolidated markets, and the current ones are evidently ineffective at it.
The biggest problem with 'voting with my wallet' is that it means we get the bad old democracy back: the poor don't get to vote, the rich get to vote more. That may have been good enough a few centuries ago, but nowadays we have universal suffrage and I think we can all agree that's better. I know in the USA there's been some back and forth about it regarding voter ID laws (getting an ID costs money so it penalizes the poor) and the fact that people who can only vote by going to the poll office may get penalized by their employers (who can dock wages for the time the employee spent not working); but technically there is universal suffrage and it's better than what came before.
The thing about "vote with your wallet" is that it's not actually a tabulation. Poor people wouldn't get a "vote" as to which yacht companies succeed or fail because they don't buy yachts, but for the same reason, why should they then care anything about yacht companies?
Conversely, the ordinary person still buys necessities, and at scale buys them in larger numbers than rich people do, because the majority of people aren't rich. So the companies making the things ordinary people actually buy do have to be responsive to them.
> I know in the USA there's been some back and forth about it regarding voter ID laws (getting an ID costs money so it penalizes the poor) and the fact that people who can only vote by going to the poll office may get penalized by their employers (who can dock wages for the time the employee spent not working)
The whole thing is so dumb. Just require ID to vote and then don't charge any fees to get an ID. Just open the polls at 8PM the eve of election day and keep them open a full contiguous 24 hours so that nobody has to come during work hours regardless of what shift they work.
> but technically there is universal suffrage and it's better than what came before.
"Technically" seems to be doing a lot of work there, because the actual problems have nothing to do with people not being able to get off work to vote.
The main one is that you have a ballot with a small, finite number of viable candidates and none of them represent your interests. In many cases they all have the same position on a particular issue and that position is different from yours. Even when their positions differ, the ones you agree with don't align.
Candidate A supports zoning reform and opposes alternative energy, Candidate B opposes zoning reform and supports alternative energy, you want both zoning reform and alternative energy, therefore you're screwed into flipping a coin. And so is everyone else, which means the politicians don't actually have to do what anybody wants because most of the votes are people who didn't like any of the candidates holding their nose to choose the one they think is the lesser evil, only to have their vote canceled out by someone who 90% agrees with them on everything but came out the other way on the coin flip.
The EU economy has been slowing down since 2007, the peak production of conventional oil. The US is still producing oil, which is why the US economy is better.
People love to think that they are richer or more successful because they are smarter. The fact is that the economy goes up when there is an abundance of energy, period.
So there is nothing to learn from falling behind the US economically, other than "the EU needs to adapt to the reality of its economy measurably slowing down". And following the US and their lack of regulations and tendency towards a fascist economy (with BigTech working together with the ruling class) is not the right direction, IMO.
> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Tech and entrepreneurs usually want to become rich by producing more. The best places to do that are where the is money, which is where the economy grows, which is where there is an abundance of cheap fossil fuels.
Entrepreneurs usually say "remove the regulations and our economy will grow again", but what they mean, really, is "remove the regulations and I will get rich, because I am on the side of those who would benefit from it".
Why is that the yard stick?
I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump
Dear lord
Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.
Not claiming that everything's sunshine and rainbows over here, but at least we aren't ruled by a proto fascist pedo actively ridding the country of its democratic institutions and destroying public service after public service to give more wealth to his pedo friends.
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
In "standard" party democracy there is just nothing that can be done. Calling it democracy as in rule of the people is a disgrace.
This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.
The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.
It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist!
It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision.
> The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe
Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.
> Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...
It failed to become a regulation (fortunately), but I have no reason to believe USB-C is different, and no better standards would have been tried by companies if they were allowed to do so.
I don't want a state-dictated standard like this. What you're saying is that because some people want iPhones and they want them with USB-C, everyone else must forgo the possibility of having a better type of connetor until "we" (Is it the majority? I don't even think the majority uses iPhones in Europe) feel like having a new one (at which point the progress has been delayed anyway and you'll also get the initial problem again). I find the premise quite capricious.
Given you must have a USB-C port, the design would still be limited by the USB-C form factor and adding another port would even further increase the complexity, costs and weight of the design. This will still strongly limit the spread of new designs, and I'm pretty sure it's effectively equivalent to mandating just USB-C for smaller devices.
Imagine a company that wants to design the next type of port. Normally, it would just do R&D and engineer the product, then put it on the market with that type of port. If the device only has that type of port, people must use it and provide feedback by choosing to keep buying the product (maybe they'll also make it explicit that they like the new port). If this phase is successful and the company opens the specs and other companies adopt it, it might become a de facto standard.
Now consider doing it with the current regulation. You need to do R&D, but the design will require higher costs because you have to make the device work with the old USB-C, too.
Maybe it's not a high cost for the company, so they do it anyway. People might use the port much less because some may not even try the new port and stick to the USB-C for simplicity, or because they are accustomed to it.
So the company won't have the same strong feedback. But let's assume they manage to make most users happy to use the new one because it's so much better. Now they open the standard. Other companies have to pay the additional engineering costs to add the other port. Some might be able to afford it just fine, while others might not want to add the complexity and costs of two ports.
Let's say, however, it spreads anyway. Now you hope the EU will accept it as a new standard so you can ditch the now-old USB-C standard. But the EU might just say "NO". It's very hard to predict if the government would be happy with it.
Given the compounding of these effects, the result is most likely that the company won't even think about wanting to develop the next standard.
The probability of a new standard happening is much reduced. And as I said before, if it weren't reduced, then the regulation would be useless to begin with, as people would use and test different connectors regardless of the USB-C support.
As I said in the root comment, I don't care too much about the connectors not evolving, but it just goes to show that people don't realise that there is no free lunch. Add constraints, and you add costs and slow down progress.
You can't force companies to add value with no costs, and value is also subjective, so the government often doesn't know what is valuable to people. At most, the government might know what some people say is valuable to them. But this is not the same thing.
Very few people would have said smartphones were the future, and they would buy one in 2007. Democracy is a very bad way for economic and technological progress to happen - unless it's for some military technology for which the government is the only customer.
Yes
> slows or blocks new types of ports from being designed and tested
No
> If the device only has that type of port, people must use it and provide feedback by choosing to keep buying the product (maybe they'll also make it explicit that they like the new port)
When getting something out on the market, they woudn't take this risk and still have a commonly used port on the side. The consumers as well would prefer to not take the risk of buing a device forcing them to use a port no other device is using.
> So the company won't have the same strong feedback
For the above reason, in the situation you describe, the feedback wouldn't be worth much, or at most it would be as worth as the situation with a more common port on the side. In one case, customers may refrain from buying the device with only the new port, because there isn't a wide market of accessories using that port yet (and not because they don't like it). In the other, the signal could be weak as consumers could just ignore the new port and keep buying the device due to the old port still being there.
I apologize, but I only skimmed the rest of your comment, because I believe it rests on a flawed premise in the first line.
Like, people didn't buy Apple products before they were forced to use USB-C? So why did Apple not want to use USB-C if that caused them to lose money and sell fewer phones? Also, if this were true, once most devices support USB-C (like they already did before the regulation), the standard would be self-enforcing and require no additional regulation.
> I apologize, but I only skimmed the rest of your comment, because I believe it rests on a flawed premise in the first line.
EDIT: Your statements seem to be self-contradictory, so it's not even about facts. "We need a regulation because companies make and sell products with different ports" is in contradiction with "Companies wouldn't take the risk of not having a common port, and consumers won't take the risk to buy them".
Also, mine wasn't a premise. My claims are not statements that follow one from the previous, but a conjunction of negated statements laid out in chronological order. So all of them must be false or not relevant for you to be right.
That statement just makes no sense. How can a new standard emerge when legally there is no option to validate its actually superior in the market?
> figures out something better
That’s not how it works. Most innovation does not occur in committees but through trial and error.
There were many competing standards and it took quite a while for the market to converge on usb-c and only then when it was already the most popular connector by far did EU determine it was the “best” standard.
Firewire, Thunderbolt 1, all kinds of different usb type ports where designed by various groups of companies it was not self evident that they will fail in the market at that point.
No industry group let alone an EU committee can know what will fail or succeed in advance its just an absurd assumption that it could ever be otherwise.
So there seems to be some confusion over premises in this thread.
The people pointing out the USB-C law as a failure are reasoning from the Golden Rule: what would happen if everyone did this? Nobody would design new connectors because of the catch-22 the law creates. You can't know what the next new connector should be without a competitive market, but governments have ended such a market. Also, to invest in a new technology requires a belief that you can actually launch it and gain profit by outcompeting other technologies, but government mandated monopolies prevent that, so there's just no incentive to do the work anymore.
The people arguing the USB-C law is fine are reasoning from a different and totally local perspective: why shouldn't we implement a command economy in Europe when we'll get the benefits of a free market economy by importing US goods anyway? They assume new tech will be developed for the US market and then all the EU has to do is have a committee that approves it.
The problem with this idea, beyond it being just pathetic, is there's no reason the US has to sell to Europe and the more annoying the EU makes trade the fewer technologies will be available for import. It's already common that new US tech products either don't launch in Europe or launch much later. Now frontier models are being restricted and not made available to European companies, that will make them fall even further behind. And we can assume that when a new connector is designed that's better than USB-C products designed around it will launch everywhere except Europe for a while, as only some products will have enough sales to justify an EU specific variant. So Europeans will eventually get used to not being able to acquire many products at home because import is blocked by the EU.
They were relying on the West for high-tech tractors and even to build factories (I know Ford helped them build some factories for a part of the factory output). I also know they used to look at the allocation of goods in the US as a starting point to decide what to produce, as they were basically running blind to what people needed or wanted.
You are. Nothing prevents the manufacturers to support other better charging solutions than USB-C. In fact many notebooks has their proprietary connectors and some smartphones use custom signaling over custom USB cable to provide better experience while complying with the regulation and support USB-C charging, too.
If I wanted to buy a device with a different type of connector, including a different form factor or a totally different charging mechanism, I should be able to do so without additional costs or additional holes drilled in the case of the device.