Its not really the government telling Apple what to do as much as ensuring that consumers are protected from monopolistic control and incompatibility.

The EEC (as the EU was in the 1980s) got together and ratified the GSM mobile standard so that consumers could travel the continent with their cellphone safe in the knowledge it worked in any country.

Failure to do this and we end up with the CDMA mess as in the states where one company tries to create its own standard or in a modern a sense a company like Apple selling 8K video phones with a USB2.0 throughput just to make a few extra bucks.