Soooo since hn has a strong libertarian streak, what's the downside?
Certainly forcing the standization of chargers seemed to make life easier across the world.
Certainly forcing the standization of chargers seemed to make life easier across the world.
I haven't seen the profits they're making so I don't know if they're going to have to, but they may.
People often overestimate corporate profits. They hear some company made two billion dollars in profits and start going "ohmygersh what rapacious capitalists", until you notice that they made two billion in profit on fifty-two billion in revenue while employing fifty thousand people. Making two cents of profit on 52 cents of transaction probably doesn't sound quite as bad, and then when you realize that if their costs were merely 4% higher it would have wiped out all their profit (and put the 50,000 employees at risk), and you probably come to a better understanding of the situation. So, what kind of cost increase for the companies is this going to be? I don't know.
Also, I don't mean that "a better understanding of the situation" means that you'll always feel sorry for the big companies, or something; I just mean you'll get a more realistic view of the situation in general, which is good regardless of your goals.
I made the numbers up, but the orders of magnitude are reasonable. There are some very large companies that make more than ~5% profit, but it's actually not a large list; 5% is not that uncommon.
Because ever since the internet was invented, it has obviously become very, very, very cheap to send data all over the world. And this is what we're talking about: your SMS needs to go from the provider in country A to provider in country B. How does it do that? Via a standardized protocol over the internet. How much does that cost? Nothing, all the network components have an internet uplink anyway.
The only thing left to explain high roaming prices is market failure, hence the need to intervene by the EU. Only we had the market failure pour its money into the EU, so it's very far off from the regulatory intervention that should have been made.
If roaming is cheaper, something else is now more expensive, given that the company's profit margin isn't high to start with.
Roaming fees are probably more progressive anyway and subsidizing plans for less mobile people, aka income limited people.
AT&T had a problem where they could not create a bill for some government networking services. It was build in that they had a fixed window which kept expiring. This went on for years while they fought to keep the contract...
I don't recall all the details but read up on FTS-2000 it was a mess.
>http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home
>Use your phone abroad at no extra cost in
>Australia
>Austria
>Denmark
>Finland
>France
>Hong Kong
>Indonesia
>Israel
>Italy
>Lanzarote - Spain
>Macau
>New Zealand
>Norway
>Republic of Ireland
>Spain
>Sri Lanka
>Sweden
>Switzerland
> and United States
Often it's even hard to tell if something is going to turn out to be a good decision or bad. So even ignoring potential corruption or incompetence and assuming best intentions, it's still seems better to me not to depend on a single entity.
> Certainly forcing the standization of chargers
Nobody forced anybody. There was no EU regulation that all phones must use such and such charger. Companies were simply optimizing for profit and that decision aligned with it.
I vividly recall the days of smartphones with custom variants of usb cables.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
Samsung / LG etc were the worst with cables you couldn't even use with different models.
Nokia + Sony were the best as theirs worked for all their respective phones + later nokia switched to USB micro. The standards change made everything so much better!
There was no EU regulation because the manufacturers fell in line when the EU threatened them with much stricter rules than what they "asked" them to adopt.