This doesn't seem right to me. It is often in companies' best interests to adopt standards, but that is because it allows them both to have an optimized supply chain.

Car manufacturers today have a lot of standards that I expect would make competition from any new contenders harder not easier. Tesla would be an example of that, they did survive but the industry thought it was never going to work precisely because of all the standards and regulations required.

On the other hand, early car manufacturers didn't have standards and shared technology stacks. At that time new car makers popped up everywhere and we had a ton of competition in the space.

Open standards are good for the consumer and good for any features that require interoperability. It has nothing to do with competition though.

I'm not opposed to open standards, but what makes you think that a corporation which simultaneously violates anti-trust law in three markets and evades meaningful enforcement can be forced to comply with standards?

The problem is not primarily technological, it is a problem of rule of law. Google is a serial violator, found guilty multiple times. So it is a failure of enforcement of law (unless government actions in the near term end up being very dramatic).

If someone points a gun to your head, I guess you could solve that by inventing a personal forcefield. But until you do, we need law enforcement as a deterrent against murder. Otherwise murderers will just keep on doing it.

We don't need agreement for this. In the past, hardware was limited, and you could only really implement one (maybe two) network stacks before things got silly. Nowadays, a software-defined radio can speak ten thousand protocols, for a lower cost than saving a cat video to your hard drive.

We only need that the standards are open, and described clearly enough for a schoolchild to implement, and that we are not prevented from adding additional protocol support to systems we acquire.

Hardware protocols are a bit different, but I actually dislike the USB-C standardisation. We already had better de-facto standards (e.g. small, "fixed-function" devices like feature phones and e-readers all use Micro USB-B for charging). Our problems were mainly "this laptop barrel charger is incompatible with this other laptop barrel charger", and proprietary Apple connectors.

The most important hardware protocol is power supply, which we can fix by requiring well-documented, user-accessible contacts that, when sufficiently-clean power is applied to them, will power the device. These could be contacts on the motherboard (for something designed to be opened up), or something like Apple's Smart Connector (without the pointless "I'll refuse to charge until you handshake!" restriction).

Requiring open, well-documented protocols which aren't unnecessarily-complicated is imo more important than requiring standard protocols.