i recognize freedom (especially as it relates to commerce) is a social construct and therefore has limits defined by society. At the same time, it does seem like in this instance at least the EU wants to have it both ways: ie it wants to be seen as operating on high-minded “principles” yet be allowed to justify fairly transparently self-interested industrial policy actions under the guise of “protection from monopolists”.
Which domestic competitors do you see them favoring with this industrial policy? Sennheiser might be the only European headphone manufacturer of consequence and I doubt they have this kind of pull.
i wasn’t intending to say that the regulations favor a specific current competitor but rather that they are intended to force apple to build in a way that favors a certain kind of potential competitor who can only operate in Europe. from a pure engineering perspective i think it’s fairly well-established that if you design, build, and test for a limited set of deployment conditions you end up with a higher quality product. which bit of wisdom apple has used decade after decade to deliver systems that delight end-users who do not relish the idea of mixing and matching and hoping the interpretation of “standards“ worked out well enough in their particular case.