From the perspective of a free and non-monopolistic market, anything from the USB consortium is massively better than an expensive proprietary standard controlled by a single vendor. Technical superiority is not the point.

I would say it’s easily possible to pick a standard that is so subpar compared to a proprietary one that it’s worse for the consumer.

A solution would be to just require any port used to be freely available and open. Require Apple to open the lightning standard and make IP related to it unenforceable.

> So you are a communist thieve of IP !!11!! Who will ever design a plug again, if it can be stolen from them by the government?!?!? /s

"jokes" like that are counter-productive to a good discussion. HN is not a place for such comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

micro usb does kind of suck, but it's vastly better than every phone having a different proprietary charger like it was before smartphones