The EU tried very hard, for very many years to signal to the industry "do this yourself so you don't have to legislate it, we don't want to legislate it, you don't want us to legislate it" but Apple (and only Apple) just refused to listen, so here we are. For micro-USB, they got the industry together in a "memorandum of understanding" to get them to self-implement it without regulation, and it worked great - everyone…
>The EU tried very hard, for very many years to signal to the industry "do this yourself so you don't have to legislate it, we don't want to legislate it, you don't want us to legislate it" but Apple (and only Apple) just refused to listen, so here we are. This doesn’t make the approach any less interventionist. “Either do what we want or we’ll pass an official regulation for you to do what we want” isn’t much of a c…
The jobs of governing bodies is not to give "choice", they are here to make sure people and companies do what they should do, and take action when they don't and it becomes a problem. The UE wanted a universal connector, for a variety of reason, they never wanted to give "choice". However, they also understand that they are not engineers and inventors, and the industry has plenty of these people, so they said "get together and make the best universal connector". And the industry did, first with micro-USB, which was better than most of what was there at the time, then with USB-C, and the EU was happy. Except that one company was a problem, so the EU went back to the industry and said "I said I wanted a universal connector, why isn't the connector universal?", Apple said "Because blah blah blah (fuck you)", and the EU said "OK, we didn't want to do that but it looks like USB-C is good enough for everyone else, so if you want to continue to sell your gadgets in the EU, use USB-C".