Any standard that is developed closed-source and is protected or proprietary, can and will prevent consumer choice further down the line.
Interoperability of data, choice between vendors, and the ability for smaller players to compete with established larger players are all directly negatively affected by a lack of open standards.
In software, the problem is closedness, protectionism, and undocumentedness, not proprietary wheel reinvention.
Quite simply, the first three problems are actually caused by proprietary wheel reinvention.
Standards can be (and are) developed cooperatively and these still allow and encourage progress.
Once upon a time, Jabber was the messaging protocol. But what killed interoperable instant messaging wasn't a shift away from Jabber: it was a shift away from interoperability. Requiring all chat communication systems to be Jabber wouldn't have helped, and it would have prevented IRCv3.
And how is interoperability possible without agreed standards?
> If you're a programmer attempting to get a program to extract the plain text out of a WordPerfect document, and are not interested in the fancy formatting and other features, this is a fairly simple process; just make the program skip the parts that are not text.
The "fancy formatting" is pretty easy to parse, too, as I understand (though I've never tried it): it's pretty much one-to-one with what's shown in the program's UI, which is literally designed to be easy to understand.
Formats like DOC (Microsoft Office's pre-DOCX format) and PSD (PhotoShop's horrid mess) require reverse-engineering, even given the (atrocious) documentation, because they're overcomplicated and the documentation is not complete. This is what I'm saying should be prohibited. We don't need to mandate that people use existing protocols or file formats.
Open standards allow interoperability by default. Open standards simplify development. Open standards encourage the creation of new markets. Open standards allow competitiveness that provides the consumer with choice, which is ultimately what a free market economy thrives on.
We only need that the standards are open, and described clearly enough for a schoolchild to implement, and that we are not prevented from adding additional protocol support to systems we acquire.
Hardware protocols are a bit different, but I actually dislike the USB-C standardisation. We already had better de-facto standards (e.g. small, "fixed-function" devices like feature phones and e-readers all use Micro USB-B for charging). Our problems were mainly "this laptop barrel charger is incompatible with this other laptop barrel charger", and proprietary Apple connectors.
The most important hardware protocol is power supply, which we can fix by requiring well-documented, user-accessible contacts that, when sufficiently-clean power is applied to them, will power the device. These could be contacts on the motherboard (for something designed to be opened up), or something like Apple's Smart Connector (without the pointless "I'll refuse to charge until you handshake!" restriction).
Requiring open, well-documented protocols which aren't unnecessarily-complicated is imo more important than requiring standard protocols.