Either Apple is following the letter of the law or it isn't. I don't know what a "warning" from EU Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton is supposed to mean.
Either the law says USB-C charging is required but doesn't say anything about charging speeds, or it does say something about charging speeds.
In any case, Apple has a lot of lawyers and presumably they're following the law as written. I would assume the EU Industry Commissioner isn't able to make up new law by himself on the fly.
Not sure about this particular one, but in general, this sort of warning is along the lines of "If you continue expending effort in subverting the spirit of the law, we shall tighten the regulations to such an extent that it will hurt you".
The world and their dog knew what the goal of the regulations were: if the goal is not met because "Apple has a lot of lawyers and presumably they're following the law as written." you can expect the law to be rewritten in a way that is punitive to Apple.
It's the responsibility of legislators and regulators to be clear and precise -- to mean what they say and say what they mean. To "punish" a company for following a law, because of something the law doesn't actually say, is not what rule of law means, and would be a shameful thing. No company should have to intuit or guess what the government "really" meant, over and above what the law actually says.
The EU can go ahead and revise the law, giving companies time to adapt again. That's fine -- that's how it's supposed to work. But some kind of "warning" to "do something we didn't say in the law" is just plain wrong.
All laws have corner cases that are not covered. All laws.
If laws were to cover every imaginable situation, they would be huge. Some already are... you have a whole bureaucracy working to understand them.
That's why you often hear about the "spirit of the law" where humans know pretty well what the legislator is trying to accomplish, even though it's not fully codified in subsequent rules.
This is simply not true. Laws can be written exceptionally clearly, and very often are.
And the "spirit of the law" is a fallacy, which your sentence exposes when you write:
> "the legislator is trying to accomplish"
Because yes, there is absolutely intent with a single legislator. But there is no such thing as intent or spirit for a legislature (or committee). A legislature can pass a law, say 51 to 49, where every one of the 51 majority legislators has a different intent for passing it. And this isn't even the exception, it's the norm -- laws are hashed out in subcommittees as inelegant compromises because each legislator wants a different thing out of it.
Legislation that gets passed has no "intent" and no, humans don't know "pretty well" what was trying to be accomplished, because it's a compromise between competing wings/individuals of a party or coalition, and the only "intent" that they could decide on was what got written in the law, and nothing else.
Again, the "spirit of the law" is a fallacy. It's an illusion people would like to believe, but it doesn't exist.
> TBH, I don't think that you know how the law works better than judges and magistrates do.
TBH, I don't think you do either, but I also know that kind of argument isn't useful here on HN.
> You know what a loophole is, right?
Yes, it's a layman's term that has no real legal meaning, and exists only in the eye of the beholder. What one person calls a tax loophole, another person recognizes as policy that a subset of legislators ensured existed in a bill.
It seems like a pretty gross oversight to not specify charging speeds if the government truly cares about it to the point they plan to take legal action against companies who fail to correctly read the minds of legislators.
Clarifying what the spirit of the law isn't "childish". Law isn't software. Judges always take the spirit of the law into account when making decisions, and precedence is as important as the actual written text. This is true in both the US and the EU.
> Study 4 illustrated the importance of breaking the spirit above and beyond the letter, as individuals can incur culpability when breaking the spirit of the law even without breaking the letter
Apple is getting advance notice that they can either voluntarily comply or they might be required to comply in the future. Would you rather be surprised?
Implementing a USB C cable, that works better on apple specific chargers, without giving that functionality to competitors, is bad faith, and against the purpose of the law.
If they end up pulling back on the plan to do this, then the warning worked.
Indeed, it is, reacting to legislation, by trying to circumvent it. Say making "Apple Certified USB-C" connectors / cables which do nothing other than force consumers to pay $50~ for a cable which costs under $1 to make.
Then FUDding the community about _dangerous unauthorized cables_ from CHYNA!!!. Yeah it's childish, unethical and anti-consumer.
So ya, know, Apple's SOP for quite a number of years.
Probably, yes. But that will take another 5 to 10 years, so nothing to fear about. It took the EU 9 years from "advocating for a common charger" [1] until they regulated it. There's enough reason to believe that it'll take them a couple of years to adjust the law.
Apple tries to find loopholes so that it still sells its own cables/chargers under the new law, by artificially restricting non apple-certified cables to how fast the can charge or transfer data. The "spirit of the law" was that you should be able to reuse cables instead of having to buy new ones for each new device. But if a company restricts features to its own cables (without any reason for example that a normal usb3 cable should not tranfer usb3 speeds) then they force customers to buy extra cables from them for their new devices. Which is what contradicts "the spirit of the law".
I am not a legal person but I can imagine several ways that this apple's practice can be made to fail. Also I do not see how anybody (apart from apple) would want this or find it reasonable to do.
I guess you don't understand how laws are working in the complex modern society. Laws are defined in human languages which has a inherent incompleteness and ambiguity, is vulnerable to drafting errors and bound to a certain amount of complexity budget. Also our society is a fast moving target and regulation is always a follower here, lawmakers are giving discretion to the administration and judiciary for how to interpret the law to give them some speed to follow up without going through all the painstaking legislation process.
But even if we're bound to this practicality, it's always about the spirit of the law. We have a principle called "statutory interpretation" which is dedicated to this problem, and administrations/judiciaries are often required to follow the law's original intent. Otherwise, administration and/or judicial branch can perform ad-hoc interpretation of legislation in favor of themselves and this defeats the whole purpose of trias politica.
Apple is not immune to this principle and EU is bound to enforce the original intent of the law. This is also why the supreme courts are one of the most important political entity in virtually every modern countries since they have the final and unobjectionable authority on interpretation of laws by setting judicial precedents. Unless you're going to challenge the whole field of Jurisprudence, it might be better try to understand why they're asking this to Apple and Apple takes it seriously.
The warning is "don't fool around", just provide usb-c without any conditions, don't make "better" and worse cables just because one has to pay the funny MFI.
If your legal system relies on reading the minds of lawmakers to infer their intent then your legal system is effectively arbitrary since those lawmakers can claim they intended anything.
Welcome to the EU, a legal system where nobody effectively elects anything and any major decisions are made without any democratic element whatsoever.
Their attempt to ratify their behavior went so badly (in France and the Netherlands where actual popular votes were collected for an "EU constitution") that they just renamed the thing and did what they want anyway.
It looks good for unelected political bureaus to take strong stances on popular things.
My guess is that Apple wants to restrict USB-c bales to certfied cables (which is not unreasonable given the number of shitty connectors out there), and limit thunderbolt/usb-4 to high end phones.
Either Apple is following the letter of the law or it isn't. I don't know what a "warning" from EU Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton is supposed to mean.
Either the law says USB-C charging is required but doesn't say anything about charging speeds, or it does say something about charging speeds.
In any case, Apple has a lot of lawyers and presumably they're following the law as written. I would assume the EU Industry Commissioner isn't able to make up new law by himself on the fly.
So what exactly is his "warning" about?