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.
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.