Now, what if the EU decides it would be in the best interests of the population to standardize mobile operating systems and they pick Android as the most broadly popular and versatile?
Well, Google effectively owns Android and the EU don't exactly love Google, either, so that ain't gonna happen.
Government intervention sometimes makes sense when there's no competitive pressure that will improve things for consumers, or no pressure on
consumers to consider the implications of their choice. Also, without environmental regulations, manufacturers are quite happy to let the taxpayer clean up their mess, dispose of obsolete chargers etc.
Back in the 1990s/early 00s, almost every single phone came with a proprietary charger and a warning that using anything else would void the warranty. Even phones from the same manufacturer sometimes had different connectors, and they were almost always "captive" to the charger. Why would manufacturers change this when they're making nice cash-y money by selling replacement/spare power adapters? Everybody else was doing it, so any "first mover" would take a hit in the pocket, putting them at a competetive disadvantage. If the EU had moved in 1998, maybe it would have made sense.
Trouble is, since then, the problem has solved itself, at least for phones, music players, e-readers and suchlike - maybe the old EU MOU for MicroUSB helped but I suspect it had more to do with the fact that (a) USB-A established itself as a ubiquitous standard and (b) 21st-century phones etc. frequently needed a data connection to a computer and hence USB - so shipping a single USB data & charge cable and a USB charger made more sense. It's not like the old EU MOU did anything to ban chargers with captive cables that were landfill if the cable frayed - the
real problem.
Even Apple, The Evil Ones (thunderclap) have actually been pretty consistent in only shipping USB-A chargers with their iDevices (...and switched to detachable USB-C cables on laptops 8 years ago...) - I seem to recall that even the very first iPods charged via FireWire, which was semi-standard, and both the old 30-pin connector and Lightning had
long lifetimes during which they were used across nearly all iDevices.
So, really, the original problem - myriad different mobile power connectors, even from the same manufacturer - has gone away and it's a mystery why the EU is still trying to fix it. Three different power connectors - microUSB, USB-C and Lightning - across the entire industry, with most power adapters on phones having detachable USB A or C cables - is
not a problem, esp. when Apple will probably switch to USB-C rather than re-invent the wheel with Lightning 2
anyway.
