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A comment on EU plans to force OEMs to use a common charger for all phones. Parent comment

Re:EU plans to force OEMs to use a common charger for all ph... by lifeisstillgood on Thursday September 23, 2021 @05:58AM (#28627176)
>>> That's because of EU regulation.

I am interested in that (because the "secret history" of many market driven change often ends up being a regulator in one influential area made a good decision - the usual example being California and car pollution standards)

Edit: just to say I am not commenting either way on the EU here, or on regulators in general. I am just interested if there was a clear point in USB standards process that EU intervention made a difference.

If so it would be useful to know their track record in this when judging this situation.

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Re:EU plans to force OEMs to use a common charger for all ph... by fundatus on Thursday September 23, 2021 @06:07AM (#28627220)
EU basically said to manufacturers: Find a common ground for charging cables / chargers, otherwise we will simply regulate it. So all manufacturers apart from Apple agreed to use microUSB (at the time). Apple was still part of this, but decided to simply provide an adapter to microUSB.
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Re:EU plans to force OEMs to use a common charger for all ph... by kalleboo on Thursday September 23, 2021 @07:45AM (#28627855)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
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Re:EU plans to force OEMs to use a common charger for all ph... by jounker on Thursday September 23, 2021 @07:10AM (#28627623)
I Lived through it. It was not obscure. It was major tech news.
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Re:EU plans to force OEMs to use a common charger for all ph... by gumby on Thursday September 23, 2021 @01:30PM (#28632348)
These regulations aren’t secret, and are usually heavily reported on — the government wants people to know it is doing things in their favor.

Before the charger regulations the biggest world wide impact of EU regulations was RoHS. That’s when the EU really started to come into its own as a global player. Did you realize all those old cables you still have lying around have lead in them to make them flexible?

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