It was not entirely voluntary, that's the point. The US government pushed very hard for an interoperable standard, and conditioned a big pile of IRA funding on supporting a fully-open standard. That was the carrot. The rest of the industry (manufacturers and chargers) also standardized and started building cars and charging infrastructure with CCS connectors. The farther this process went, the less likely it would have been that Tesla would have been able to force a switch, and so they would have had to (expensively) update their new and older cars to this standard. This was the stick.
But yes, it was all done through encouragement and coordinated coercion. Nobody showed up at Tesla's HQ with guns and forced this to happen.
More like voluntarily pushed or strong-armed by the prospect of governments mandating Tesla support a different connector thus forcing more complexity in their cars and chargers.
Arguably there's no evidence for Tesla ever wanting to use its plug as a moat. The Tesla connector pre-dates CCS1 as a standard. By the time that it was clear that the rest of the industry would converge on CCS1 in North America, the investments made by Tesla (and its customers) on their connector was far too great to contemplate shifting.
Whereas in other markets, the business case for converging on CCS2 was more compelling. Europe chose to compel CCS2 as their standard, but in Australia, Tesla pivoted to CCS2 without any government pressure.
They offered their patent conditioned on a reciprocal patent grant (or agreement not to enforce any patents against Tesla) from the takers, as far as I understand. The difference with NACS is that they genuinely opened the connector and removed that requirement.
"using alphabet for geopolitical purposes" sounds a bit exaggeration to me. It's like saying that Gothic script serves neo-nazi purposes. Sure they do print some stuff in Gothic. But should we now shame a German-cuisine restaurant that's branded in Gothic script?
An alphabet is connected to a language. And controlling the language and its writing, especially related to religion is a very powerful tool. How you do communication, what culture is relevant for you, etc.
And that happens even today - just think of the role English plays, and then American cultural artefacts. And compared it to French at the turn of the 20-th century
Yes, spreading the language creates a lot of opportunities. But not the script. Tadjiks are taught Russian. Both languages use Cyrillic, but in another country with different language but same script, you'd be almost as helpless as transitioning between Cyrillic and Arabic (Iran, which has Farsi, which is almost identical to Tadjik).
And in this regard, the west should be happy: Russia has poor culture of spreading its education. In Central Asia, Turkey has put a lot more effort in building and financing its schools and universities, where they teach English and Turkish. Putin's Russia is just ridiculous in this sense: it keeps "Houses of Friendship" with balalaikas, bear mascots and free vodka on holidays.
One of my friends hitch-hiked from Russia to Iran in the mid-2010s. Despite the countries being sorta friends, he had to speak with the local in broken English, not Russian. That's just ridiculous. Another friend hitchiked to Tajikistan, and there they do learn Russian at schools and can have a bare minimum of a conversation.
During the USSR, the Soviet government pushed the cyclic script on populations that speak very different languages, sometimes forcing them to abandon other scripts, i.e. arabic. Same during the Russian Empire.
Some Central European countries adopted the Latin script as a part of their alignment with Rome, and thus making a stronger political alignment.
Scripts and languages are very powerful political tools. In many cases what script a language uses is not a coincidence but a result of conscious choices and policies at some point.
In these examples, political will and power came first and brought scripts after them. And in all examples, literacy was miniscule.
Also, this would mean that countries using latin, like Indonesia, should be more pro-Western. I guess there might be a correlation, but a tiny one.
Although, same script does help readability and translating things, I'm sure current emphasis on Cyrillic by Russian government (while I lived in Russia, I haven't noticed it at all) is just because it's another occasion to remind the narratives. Not because it's such a super powerful tool. At least, in Russia, in late 80s early 90s, pro-Western narratives spread easily, despite everything.
I do see it as a reason to remind some political dogmas (and btw geopolitics is pure pseudoscience), but that'a whole different topic than creation of Cyrillic. I don't want to mark every item as pro- or against Putin.
