{"id":93258,"date":"2025-01-01T05:00:51","date_gmt":"2025-01-01T10:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=93258"},"modified":"2024-12-31T15:12:32","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T20:12:32","slug":"the-eu-emulates-king-canute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/01\/01\/the-eu-emulates-king-canute\/","title":{"rendered":"The EU emulates King Canute"},"content":{"rendered":"

The headline is a bit misleading, as Canute’s failed attempt to control the tides<\/a> was intended to refute courtiers’ exaggerations about his royal powers. The EU, on the other hand, is determined to impose stasis on a very dynamic and changing field<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The European Union will have the continent-wide standard for the buggy whip real soon now. That’s the logical conclusion to draw from that recent announcement about USB-C. <\/p>\n

For those who’ve not been following along at home the European Commission is very proud of itself. They’ve managed to pass a law mandating that USB-C (don’t worry, it’s a shape of cable) be the only flavour of connector now allowed within the EU. This has caused the less intellectual of our own rulers \u2014 St Stella for example<\/a> \u2014 to just quiver, gasp, with excitement. This is proof of the ability of the collective bureaucracy to really stick one to The Man or something. A vast victory over Big Cable it seems.<\/p>\n

Well, yes. Those with a little history to their name will know that the EU has been trying to do this for some time now. So much time that they’d originally intended to make Micro-USB the Europe-spanning insistence<\/a> but it took them so long to make their rules that USB-C had already superseded it.<\/p>\n

At which point we might draw a couple of conclusions. Even, suggest an insistence or two. That first insistence would be that a time of rapid technological change is really not quite le moment juste<\/em> to be insisting upon only the one way of doing things. Because change, d’ye see? No, this is important for we know, absolutely, that there’re people out there just itching to insist upon the one connector for electric vehicles. Who would, in the name of a vapid uniformity, insist upon freezing technology at its current state rather than allow it to develop.<\/p>\n

We could, should, also go on to insist that such a legal insistence on the only form allowed means that technological development cannot happen any more. For, in order to advance or even just change it will be necessary to change that law, that definition.<\/p>\n

Legal changes in the European Union are not easy. Of course, the Parliament cannot do it \u2014 they are not allowed to even propose law changes, let alone enact them. It is necessary first to convince the European Commission of the need for a change. That means convincing the bureaucracy of course. Once that’s done it must pass the Council of Ministers, which is all the national governments. Parliament is then allowed to say yes. Then, and only then, would it be possible to put the new technology \u2014 say, a new cable \u2014 on the market.<\/p>\n

But the only method we’ve got of testing whether a new cable is better is by putting it on the market. That is \u2014 no, really \u2014 the only process by which we find out whether consumers desire this new cable with all its delights, at the price that suppliers are willing to make it. But in the European system they cannot undertake the basic usefulness test until they’ve convinced a continent full of politicians that the new is in fact necessary and compulsory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The headline is a bit misleading, as Canute’s failed attempt to control the tides was intended to refute courtiers’ exaggerations about his royal powers. The EU, on the other hand, is determined to impose stasis on a very dynamic and changing field: The European Union will have the continent-wide standard for the buggy whip real […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,831,62,15],"tags":[337,661,547],"class_list":["post-93258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-business","category-europe","category-technology","tag-eu","tag-regulation","tag-smartphones"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-oga","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93258"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93261,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93258\/revisions\/93261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}