If companies are unwilling to do something that's in the best interests of their users and customers, then government is the only way to force them in a more socially beneficial way. Government absolutely has its place. Self-regulation only works as long as companies are actually willing to do what's necessary.

The short version: There is no particular reason to expect governments to be bad at this. Sure, they won't be able to roll out new features as quickly, but there's a lot of private-sector BS and necessary evils that they won't roll out, either, because they won't have to. The state has been in the business of establishing standards since the dawn of time for good reasons. Tech companies are incentivized to constantly release new "U"SB standards, for example, all of which improve on their predecessors in some way, but are a lot less Universal as a result. At the other end of the adapter, on your wall outlet, how many new standards for that plug have been released in the same time frame? Sure, the outlet could be a lot better, but we gain a lot in exchange by just not having the churn.

The long version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200222053906/http://slatestarc...