Sounds like the eu-us trade war 2.0 (?).
Is it a US/US trade war, too?
Not everything is a trade war; sometimes a naughty company is just a naughty company.
The "Police and thieves in the street" problem as I call it, is that in most discussions we hear about the two big noisy players duking it out for control.
In reality it's a three way struggle. By far the largest and most powerful group is often completely silent and omitted from the analysis.
"Consumers" or "Voters" (although I would prefer the term "people") are subsumed into the other camps, each claiming to "represent" the people.
Yet the silent, overwhelming majority are starting to reclaim a voice of their own. This is a worrying sign. Not because people shouldn't have a voice, but because it shows clearly that at best, governments and commercial markets are failing to represent the actual interests of people. Perhaps we've become complacent allowing plurality of power structures, unions, assemblies, societies etc to weaken?
Citizens?
But many countries do not officially recognise "citizenship". For example, in Britain (UK) we remain "subjects" although "citizen" is used in official documents.
Maybe splitting hairs; but I don't want to assume that everyone in the world enjoys such a privileged status.
If anything people in the US should be glad the EU is doing this, since it might also benefit them in the long term.
... that actually tracks pretty well.
It probably started with public companies not paying dividends and instead rewarding the shareholders by share price increases.
This means they have to grow indefinitely. The logical outcome is having one all-encompassing monopoly that handles everything. Kinda like a state economy, but they don't get the irony.
Unregulated free market capitalism that so many people seem to root for (knowingly or unknowingly) is just a degenerate version of the system that invariably results in cartels, price-fixing, rent seeking, thought policing, human exploitation and suffering, which is really just a different version of the "communist" boogeyman that they fear for the same reasons.
Heck, limited liability corporations can only exist because laws make them possible.
To be clear, fining is not stealing except in some kind of liberal dystopian fantasy.
And fining based on global revenue is necessary because it's all too easy otherwise to artificially shift revenue between various places to evade these kind of fines.
The fine is limited by law to 10% of global revenue, and the EU market is more than 10% of Apple's revenue, so there's nothing particularly egregious here. Also, obviously Apple is not forced to do business in the EU if they don't like the rules.
Many countries have fines relative to the income of the perpetrator. If you get caught speeding as a tourist in Norway do you expect to get away without having to pay anything since you don't have an income in Norway?
Apple is free to do whatever they want that is legal in the US.
Yes but if Apple thinks nobody in the US will look at what's happening to Epic games from a competition point of view, they're wrong