So after thinking about this for a while, following the EU decision:
If I were a lobbyist for the phone industry - I'd be shouting "What about".
All those other cordless devices, with the plethora of chargers, that aren't being mandated. Wireless mice. Cordless shavers. Bluetooth speakers. Wireless earphones. Tablets. Laptops. Battery power stations. Adult toys. Battery operated power tools. Golf carts. Electric cars.
Now, USB-C is a nice standard, but it's hardly one size fits all. If you are mandating for one industry - why not all of them? Phones are a large industry, but it's hardly alone in promulgating a bunch of random chargers and by and large it's actually done fairly well in self-regulating itself.
Just think about power tools, to pick one single example there - I have more different chargers and batteries, even from models made from the same company... it's ridiculous. I'd love to have a 12, 18, 40, and 80V Li-Ion battery standards (and chargers) that worked in every cordless drill, saw, or other power tool. But it won't happen.
My second argument is that the phone industry already had settled around a standard: Qi, and only after doing so did they drop the requirement that you had to have a wired charger and stop including them with the product. So making a wired standard is pointless. And if I were Apple, I would strongly think about having the "courage" to just drop the wired port all together - they have had all the bits in place to make it redundant to wireless technology for years now, and the port in my iPhone largely just acts as a lint trap any more.
