Earlier quoted context omitted.
When in history has interoperability not been a catalyst for innovation? Look at everything people do in browsers now. Or if that's not to your taste, perhaps the era of BASIC is a better example. Not all standards are good, but a decent standard is better, or at least much more practically useful, than a lot of better but incompatible proprietary equivalents. Of course it doesn't have to be mandated, and in the past…
When in history has interoperability not been a catalyst for innovation? Most of it, including most of the history of computers. Competition almost always breeds innovation. It's basic economics, and why people get upset by monopolies and such.
This same kind of madness, of course, totally already exists elsewhere. I’m sorry but, out of the hundreds of thousands of different power connectors, most of them aren’t even very well thought out to begin with, less “innovative.” It turns out that delivering power to a device isn’t that interesting, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it horribly wrong. For every MagSafe that has at least some redeeming qualities, there’s about 500 DELL power bricks out there. And for something that is effectively delivering small amounts of low voltage DC power, in fact often one of about 2 or 3 different voltages, it’s sad that you have to scour the earth for chargers that match the pinout of your device.
But wait a minute. We’re not even talking about laptops, but essentially just mobile phones and cameras. So where’s the innovative competitor to USB-C that we’re all so worried about getting stomped on by the EU? Even Apple has adopted USB-C for almost everything except iPhone. micro USB hardly exists on new phones, even the budget phones are switching to USB-C.
The market doesn’t just automatically do the right thing. Apple is simply too powerful for market forces alone to compel them to use a “standard” charger, and actually, the friction of changing something that works probably makes it resistant against that, but just because that’s the case does not mean it is the right way to go for consumers or the world in general, in the long term. And once enough people are tired of that non-sense, they turn to regulation. And I’m sure regulation like this is annoying—what does the EU know about connectivity and mobile phone design—but it’s probably relieving to Apple, because it roughly solves the problem of having to reconcile it: they either do it, or they are in violation of the law. Problem solved!
And no innovation was harmed, because plugging phones in is not that interesting.
P.S.: Interoperability absolutely breeds innovation, and it does not mean no competition, it builds a framework for competition. Standards do obviously limit what you can do, but in exchange they open many doors that would otherwise be closed. Please tell me you don’t think the “innovation” from having 30 competing hypertext formats would’ve been the ideal path to “innovation” for the world wide web.