Benson Leung, a Google engineer who had long been crusading against the sale of cheap, substandard USB Type-C cable on Amazon, finally had the last laugh earlier this week after the e-commerce giant decided to comply with his demand.
Starting now, Amazon announced, no sub-standard USB Type-C cable will be allowed to be listed on the site.
Leung, part of Google’s Chromebook Pixel and Pixel C team, has been testing dozens of USB-C cables to assess whether or not they were manufactured as per the rulebook and were compatible with devices that depended on the new port technology.
The finding this one-man investigation was worrying as flawed USB-C cables could cause catastrophic system damage or device failure. Similarly, some flawed cable may work with one system while being completely undetected by another.
Considering the severity of the issue, Amazon has now updated its terms and conditions for item sales, prohibiting “Any USB-C™ (or USB Type-C™) cable or adapter product that is not compliant with standard specifications issued by “USB Implementers Forum Inc.”
While this is indeed a step in the right direction, there’s little hope that things will change drastically anytime soon as Amazon can not really volunteer to conduct a quality check on all the USB-C cables submitted on the site.
Leung is optimistic, though. “Really great news, but we all have to continue to be vigilant and call out any bad products we find on Amazon and other stores (both online and brick and mortar) as we find them,” he wrote on his Google Plus page.