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Comment by occz | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see the EU swiftly put down the law and make an example of Apple in this case. I'm sure it won't take too many 10% of global revenue-fines before they get in line.

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Why should the EU fine 10% of Apple's global revenue when they're violating an EU-specific law? Shouldn't they just fine 10% of EU revenue?

> I'm sure it won't take too many 10% of global revenue-fines before they get in line.

I'm sure it won't take too many of those before Apple just decides to leave the EU wholesale, as it only accounts for around 10% of their own annual revenue.

The EU should fine as much as it is necessary to financially impact the corporation for violating the laws.

It's global revenue (all the way up the ownership structure) because that closes one of the world's most obvious loopholes, where you create an EU-based subsidiary that takes a tiny commission for selling products/services from non-EU companies, therefore having minimal revenue to fine. The GDPR fine structure works the same way. Though, 10% is a limit, fines usually start smaller.

If you've read up on BEPS, or most forms of tax-minimization that occur in EU countries, it makes perfect sense that they'd expect that to happen.

That's true, I forgot about the subsidiary sneakiness that corps do all the time. My thought process when asking the question was that yesterday I'd read a discussion here on HN about the US District Court testimony where Tim Sweeny/Epic said that they had deliberately flouted and broken Apple's developer agreement; the argument was that this testimony "doesn't count" because it happened outside of the EU – despite Epic and Epic Sweden being the same business run by the same guy.

> Why should the EU fine 10% of Apple's global revenue when they're violating an EU-specific law? Shouldn't they just fine 10% of EU revenue?

The precedent for global enforcement of rules has already been set by the US.

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