I'm more suggesting that bad decisions should be litigated against fast-and-early, so other companies aren't encouraged to follow in Apple's footsteps. If every company had their own Lightning connector, there would be no choice but to force them all to converge. The original sin is letting it happen at all, in the first place.
Who decides which ideas are good and bad? I assume you wouldn’t want regulators to have retroactively forced Apple to keep floppy disk drives in their computers. Or cdrom drives? It’s just the “obviously bad” ideas that should be banned, right?
Do you have a crystal ball that lets you know ahead of time which choices are good and bad? Even in retrospect I’m not sure Apple made the wrong choice with the lightning connector. It’s a better connector in just about every way than micro-usb, which was the only standard alternative at the time. Apple’s experience with lightning was rolled into the design process for usb-c, which as I understand it they were heavily involved in. USB-c might not exist as it does today without Apple’s experiments with the lightning connector.
Even if we pretend you’re better at picking winners and losers in the tech world than Apple and Samsung, do you think regulators are going to be as canny as you are with this stuff? US politicians don’t seem to understand the difference between Facebook and the internet. Are you sure you want them making tech choices on your behalf?
If you ask me, I think regulators would make a dogs breakfast of it all. If they were involved we’d probably still have laws on the books mandating that all laptops still have parallel ports or PCMCIA slots or something. The free market can sure take its time figuring this stuff out. But competition does, usually, lead to progress.
