Tapping into its strength in numbers, the European Union this month pushed through a major change for the global tech industry—having abandoned hopes of companies opting to change on their own.
In early October, the EU Parliament in Brussels voted to impose a single, uniform charger for every smartphone, camera, and video game console either manufactured in the EU’s 27 countries or sold to its 450 million residents. That means that tech companies will need to produce countless millions of items, including Google’s Android phones and Apple’s iPhones, with USB-C ports, or, by 2024, stop selling them in the world’s biggest consumer market. By spring 2026, laptops will also fall under the law. That, says EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton, “is an important step to increase convenience and reduce waste.”
It is also the culmination of more than a decade of wrangling between Big Tech and the EU, in some ways making the “common charger” law a political end-run around the industry.
For years, EU officials in Brussels tried to coax Apple, Motorola, Nokia, and others, to agree on a uniform port for devices, allowing people to finally get rid of the mountain of cables that pile up in offices and homes, or are dumped in landfills. The EU estimates that cables account for about 51,000 of the region’s more than 4 million tons of electric waste every year, generated from items like discarded household appliances and electronic devices.
In some ways, the EU’s entreaties worked: From dozens of different chargers a decade ago, the tech industry trimmed its ports to a few standard ones.
But for years, Apple pushed back against Brussels’s calls to replace the lightning charger—a port unique to Apple devices like iPhones and iPads—and spent millions lobbying EU officials against the EU’s common charger plans. The company rolled out its first lightning port in 2012—three years after signing a nonbinding agreement with the EU, along with other companies, to manufacture smartphones with one standard mini-USB connection. Just weeks before the EU vote on Oct. 4, Apple released the iPhone 14, featuring a lightning connector. (Google’s new Pixel 7 phone, released on Thursday, carries a USB-C port.)
For consumers, the need for a common charger seems clear. “There are kilometers of cables in every house,” says Andrey Kovatchev, a Bulgarian member of the EU Parliament, who helped oversee the common charger legislation, for which he has fought since first being elected in 2009. “I have three kids, and they’re playing next to me right now with one video game, and a very different charger to everything else,” he said by phone from Brussels on Thursday. “Everyone has 20 or 30 cables at home,” he says. “It’s much better to have two or three equal cables to use with your phone, camera, reader, keyboard, and laptop.”
But Kovatchev says EU politicians finally gave up expecting Big Tech to agree to that. “There were producers who tried to convince us that this would hamper R&D and innovation, and that it should be left to the market,” he says. “After more than 10 years waiting for voluntary action by industry, we considered it high time to introduce the law.” The EU Parliament passed the common charger rule with overwhelming support, in a 602–13 vote. Tech companies have not responded to the decision.
And yet, much as the move seems to benefit consumers, some critics regard the common charger as trivial, compared with more serious tech challenges in Europe.
Especially worrying is the EU’s faltering attempts to compete with the U.S. and China on investments for crucial technology, like battery production, cloud services, and space travel. A report last year by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington found the EU was also badly lagging in A.I., with far smaller investment and venture capital in the sector than either the U.S. or China.
“SpaceX is launching multiple rockets this year, and Ariane [France’s commercial space rocket company Arianespace] has barely any, but meanwhile, we have the common charger,” says André Loesekrug-Pietri, president of the Joint European Disruptive Initiative, or JEDI, a Paris-based organization that aims to kick-start large-scale tech projects in Europe. He calls the efforts by EU Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen and internal-market commissioner Thierry Breton to pass a common-charger law “a total misjudgment about what’s important.”
But Kovatchev says the EU’s laws—like other measures—inevitably have worldwide impact, as tech companies are compelled to tweak their products. That gives the decisions taken in Brussels importance far beyond Europe. He believes the USB-C port will “become a global reference” for tech devices, much like Global System for Mobile communications, or GSM, the technology Europe developed for early mobile phones. Europe rolled out GSM in the early 1990s, and it was adopted widely across the world.
Yet in the end, European mobile-phone manufactures Nokia and Eriksson were dwarfed by giants elsewhere like Huawei and Apple. And even as tech companies adopt USB-C as the standard for devices, Europe might once again struggle to gain a foothold in the global market for digital cables. “It is not going to be produced in the EU,” Loesekrug-Pietri says. “It will be produced in China and Taiwan.”
