Deployment of USB was happening anyway. I don't understand this belief that the Commission has anything to do with USB adoption. It predates the Commissions's involvement by a long way, USB was developed completely independently and the vast majority of consumer electronics firms see no competitive advantage in making their own chargers/cables so standardisation was the direction of travel anyway. Only Apple bother developing their own proprietary charging and cable standards, and as they proved, the regulation is toothless: they simply shipped a cheap adapter nobody cared about or used and that was the regulation solved.
I think there's a lot of backwards reasoning here. Lots of people want to believe the EU is good, therefore, if it does something, it must be good. This kind of nitpicky regulation is worthless: if there had been genuine, fierce competition over cable systems the EU would never have dared to regulate in the first place. It was only because the industry was standardising anyway that they were able to pass such a rule, and take credit for other people's engineering work.
As for open vs closed communication standards, that's a red herring. Lots of firms have had unusual ideas about how to advance consumer communications, which is why we mostly use their products (with the obvious and major exceptions of the web and email). But in charging standards and many other areas people realised their efforts were best pooled. Government had no impact on these decisions but can certainly now impede innovations if someone does come up with some revolutionary new cable idea.
Look at it this way. If this regulation had applied to computers pre-Steve Jobs we might never have seen MagSafe cables. They'd have been literally illegal which is insane. The EU is way out of bounds here. It's the sort of thing that supported the case of Brexit - celebrated last night.