That said, the EU does regulate every market it participates in. If you can find it on a store shelf, you'll find EU regulation about it.
One of the major driving forces behind the Brexit vote was to "get rid of all of the EU paperwork". Of course they still have to get their paperwork in order if they want to export to the EU now, but for their internal market they're free to ignore all the EU regulations if they want to. As it turns out, most of those regulations were quite reasonable so a lot of the old regulations remained unchanged, but they were definitely there.
Vehicles are definitely regulated in Europe (see that story with Volkswagen, an EU brand, cheating the regulation as an example [1])
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
EDIT: I realize this started in the US but EU countries also went after VW and other EU brands after that
We didn't have as big an emissions scandal in Europe because the European Commission knew about the manipulation as early as in 2010 but didn't act on it.
When it comes to regulation in the car industry, I can't help but feel like the car manufacturers are the ones writing the law. They'll gladly make the safety technology they're already building into every car mandatory to get rid of foreign competition, but when emissions come up, progress slows down all of the sudden.
This stuff happens everywhere regulation applies, though. I distinctly remember an absurd article shared here on HN that detailed how over in the USA there was a conspiracy by Big Pasta to alter regulations in such a way that would prevent European brands from competing, for example.
If EU, or maybe just Germany was even concerned about ecology they would heavily tax those heavy monsters of "crossover" cars and similar garbage and transfer that money to EVs, but they don't. Nobody touches EU car industry where it actually hurts.
The EU only regulates markets they are participating in. The only country that regulates markets that they do not participate in is the United States, and for the most part they seem to be doing so for fairly good reasons (such as with the anti money laundering and anti terrorism financing laws). Though of course you are free to disagree with whether or not you think those are good reasons.
It's great! Exactly because there is no conflict of interest.
(From another viewpoint, they have ASML which is crucial for the creation of these products so let's not pretend they are only on the consumer side of things)
This is incredibly inaccurate, there's tons of regulations in the EU for just about anything produced or imported here. One big example: cars, which the EU produces quite a lot of, see EURO emission standards for a specific example.
But it's amazing how many people are so quick to essentially say 'F the planet, I don't mind buying a new phone every 2 years, and I really don't want my next iPhone to be 2mm fatter!'.
That's your problem then, don't you think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_phone_brands_by...
Now, whether all of these are actually manufactured locally or not is another matter, but the EU definitely is regulating its own market. As they have been empowered to do so.
I'm all for it. And I would love to see standardized battery packs for electric vehicles as well because I think that will be a much bigger issue in the longer term.
No need to play the man or be belittling.
Point still stands that the EU smartphone market is so little that any regulation isn't hurting them. Regulation on car repairability definitely would, hence why you stil need to visit the BMW dealer if you want to change the 12-volt battery or activate your heated seats. The EU will not likely do anything about that.
And right to repair is very much a part of EU regulations. Without those regulations you'd be in a far worse situation.
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/automotiv...
If BMW idiocy gets you upset: don't drive BMW. My car is 25 and I can do just about anything I want on it. Your beef is first and foremost with BMW, and I'm fairly sure that if the EU deems this kind of behavior anti competitive it will be smacked down, even if the participants are all EU based.
You seem to want regulation to be perfect, but in light of manufacturer abuses it's a catch-up game.
https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/how-far-will-the-in...
Is a good article on the subject, it also helps to see that there is a fine line between what has to be made available and be subscription free and where manufacturers may have some leeway.
I agree with you that changing out a battery (which is a pretty common affair) should never require a trip to the stealer.
I don't have beef with BMW, that was just an example. "Don't drive a BMW" is the equivalent of "Don't buy an iPhone" if you care about repairability. It shouldn't be like that.
The number of EU companies affected by EU regulations is far larger than the number of companies from abroad. Your example fails because the same amount of regulation that applies to EU car manufacturers also applies to manufacturers from abroad. The EU is in that sense one of the fairest players.
According to your philosophy no amount of regulation on mobile phones would be acceptable because the EU has no big name phone manufacturer any more. But as others have already pointed out this legislation affects far more than just mobile phones so your argument simply fails.
That's exactly the kind of thing they don't do, and for good reasons.
As you can see from the link posted above they do a lot to ensure right to repair, but it isn't perfect. Give it some time.
All the recent Gigaset phones have replaceable Batteries. I use a GS5 and a Rephone with SailfishOs.
Much of the Plasma development for mobile is spear headed by devs in Germany (KDE folk).
Point being, the heritage of Nokia is not quite dead yet.
It has dual SIM capability but if you use that you lose the SD slot.
There is also GerdaOS (instead of KaiOS) and you can run Debian on it. When I get my next phone (which could well be years, this one is now 4 years old and still going strong) I plan on running stock linux on it to see what else you can do with it. I paid about 80 euros for it.
The fact that you can upgrade a 24kWh 2011 Leaf to a 40kWh battery makes me optimistic for the current-gen cars: by the time they need a battery replacement, we'll have better and/or cheaper batteries available for them.
This regulation does cover vehicles.
It also covers a wide range of devices, including ones that are indeed made by the EU.
Beyond that, I think "only regulate things you make" is a silly standard. The point of regulations are (or should be) to protect consumers, not to disadvantage companies. The EU has lots of consumers who buy smartphones and thus has a very legitimate reason to want to regulate them to protect their consumers.
So redesigning Tesla cars will get a bigger result than apple AirPods.
And there is a Gigafactory in Germany that will be first up to make clunky Teslas. So they are definitely regulating themselves.
It's easy to pass onerous regulations when you won't take an economic hit for it.