People in the US like to make fun of the seemingly endless bureaucratic hurdles that the EU Governments keep putting in the way of US companies looking to make a quick buck. You know, having to worry about boring things like “privacy” and “interoperability” and “security”, that kind of thing. Oh, and maintaining free-market competition -- imagine lecturing the USA about how to achieve that! But every now and then, this endless stream of new regulations hits the jackpot. Like how Google is suddenly able to offer full two-way compatibility with Apple’s formerly-proprietary “AirDrop” feature for exchanging files between mobile devices -- the file exchange is done directly, peer-to-peer, without going through any central servers. It’s all down to the fact that the EU forced Apple to move away from the completely proprietary low-level radio protocol it was originally using for AirDrop, towards something that was more amenable to exactly the sort of reverse-engineering of the higher-level protocol that Google did. Of course Apple did also contribute work towards the new standard, just as it did with USB Type-C; it’s better to be seen to be cooperating with inevitability, rather than futilely trying to fight it tooth and nail. <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/the-eu-made-apple-adopt-new-wi-fi-standards-and-now-android-can-support-airdrop/>