[rsynnott]

EU regulation primarily governs European companies and the European subsidiaries of foreign companies; at most, you generally only see leakage outside Europe (eg RoHS has kind of spread; rather than produce separate non-toxic products for Europe and toxic for RoW, a lot of companies have gone non-toxic everywhere; Apple was a leader there). If your only window into EU regulation is Hackernews, I can _kind_ of see how you'd come to this conclusion, but regulation of tech multinationals is very much a drop in the bucket.

But also I mean I think you're confused about the purpose of these rules. While certain EU rules are protectionist, these ones aren't; the purpose of forcing manufacturers to make things repairable isn't to promote European manufacturers over foreign ones, it's to protect the consumer.