alt Hacker News> Can you imagine Europe's reaction?
And they'd be right to do so. The correct approach to creating a new standard is plan interoperability from the start. If a vendor plans lock in by introducing a new standard, they should get shut down immediately and told to do better.
That sounds like a way to not get any progress. The way I'm used to this sort of thing happening is some company brings in a new proprietary standard, makes bank, then all the competition bands together to form an open standard to try and stop them. There is a bit of a tick-tock feeling as consortiums use more open and accessible standards to slowly lever power away from incumbents.
It is interesting to just glance at the history of USB [0] through that lens was originally developed, and it is interesting to see that as I would have predicted the group of companies that developed USB (MS, IBM, Compaq, etc) seem to be disjoint from the companies listed as precursor technologies (looks like that was especially an Apple-led consortium of hardware manufacturers organised around firewire [1]).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Patent_consideration...