Whoever asked this have not considered for one second what would it mean in a way that can be put into legislation to "make drivers that work equally in linux, windows and even macOS". This is an incredibly, incredibly difficult topic. How would you phrase and likely measure "equality" here? I have no clue how to answer this even in layman terms. Perhaps someone would need to create and maintain a test suite covering all class of peripherals covered by the legislation and mandate this test suite passes. But even that would not cover performance. Much good does it to you if the video card tests pass unaccelerated.
And then the way this question is put forward also shows this person is not at all familiar with how the EU works. The EU does not have laws in the very first place. It does not. But that aside, the amount of study and coordination that goes into creating or amending an existing directive is just monumental. You would need a strong, compelling need to go through a multi year process, costing many millions of euros. In this case, the need was crystal clear: "these new obligations will lead to more re-use of chargers and will help consumers save up to 250 million euro a year on unnecessary charger purchases. Disposed of and unused chargers account for about 11 000 tonnes of e-waste annually in the EU". How many EU consumers are even affected? Because mobile phone chargers, these days, affect everyone (above the age of three or some such).
Here's a quote from the relevant USB C legislation:
Stakeholder consultations
The following consultation activities were conducted between May 2019 and April 2021 in order to assess potential areas for revision and the impacts of the suggested policy option in various areas:
– an inception impact assessment (2018-2019) targeted citizens, consumer
associations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers;
– a public consultation (2019) targeted member states, citizens, consumer associations, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers;
– two consumer surveys (2019 and 2021) targeted citizens;
– a stakeholders survey (2020-2021) targeted Member States, citizens, consumer
associations, and manufacturers;
Whoever asked this have not considered for one second what would it mean in a way that can be put into legislation to "make drivers that work equally in linux, windows and even macOS". This is an incredibly, incredibly difficult topic. How would you phrase and likely measure "equality" here? I have no clue how to answer this even in layman terms. Perhaps someone would need to create and maintain a test suite covering all class of peripherals covered by the legislation and mandate this test suite passes. But even that would not cover performance. Much good does it to you if the video card tests pass unaccelerated.
And then the way this question is put forward also shows this person is not at all familiar with how the EU works. The EU does not have laws in the very first place. It does not. But that aside, the amount of study and coordination that goes into creating or amending an existing directive is just monumental. You would need a strong, compelling need to go through a multi year process, costing many millions of euros. In this case, the need was crystal clear: "these new obligations will lead to more re-use of chargers and will help consumers save up to 250 million euro a year on unnecessary charger purchases. Disposed of and unused chargers account for about 11 000 tonnes of e-waste annually in the EU". How many EU consumers are even affected? Because mobile phone chargers, these days, affect everyone (above the age of three or some such).
Here's a quote from the relevant USB C legislation:
Stakeholder consultations
The following consultation activities were conducted between May 2019 and April 2021 in order to assess potential areas for revision and the impacts of the suggested policy option in various areas:
– an inception impact assessment (2018-2019) targeted citizens, consumer associations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers;
– a public consultation (2019) targeted member states, citizens, consumer associations, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers;
– two consumer surveys (2019 and 2021) targeted citizens;
– a stakeholders survey (2020-2021) targeted Member States, citizens, consumer associations, and manufacturers;
– targeted interviews (2021) targeted consumer associations, environmental associations, market surveillance authorities, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and manufacturers;
– expert group meetings targeted consumer associations, Member States, market surveillance authorities, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and manufacturer
And all of that was to survey compelling to use an existing, well understood, already ubiquitous standard.