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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> The EU is free to pass laws preventing gatekeepers and insisting on interoperability requirements and Apple is free to refuse to do that and not offer their non-competitive gatekeeping products in the EU.

Apple is also free to lobby the US government and people to take action against the EU. Especially if Trump gets elected, Apple complaining about Europe taking advantage of American companies would resonate with a lot of the officials likely to staff such an administration.

Given Russia, it is likely that the US has far more leverage on the EU than the EU has on the US.

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Why should the US government care if Apple chooses not to sell some of their products in the EU because they don't want to abide by the EU's laws? The EU isn't taking advantage of US companies, or looking to pressure the US. The EU has every right to set their own laws and businesses can decide for themselves if they want to sell their products there. The fact that Russia exists doesn't change that.

Because even without public ownership of Apple stock China style or even any lobbing from Apple, the US government are effectively "invested" in their gains via taxation. Apple's interests are the US's interests to some small extent (technically so is that small coffee shop down the block). Geopolitical interest implies they'd care enough to at least nudge the EU a little.

Eu has lots of leverage too against US. Lobbying for actions against eu may have absolutely bad consequences and it's totally bonkers to think/prise that an us company has this much power proving once again that maybe it's a good think eu doesn't have such big corpos

The EU just has to hint that they’d move closer to china, and all this supposed leverage would evaporate.

Both us and eu are heavily relying on China. Even Nvidia sells lots of gpus with small limitations to china that in the end will not change things that much. Or ASML sells non covered by sanctions chip production utilities. All this trade war is just scratching the surface, in reality heavy money are made by all parts

This clever geopolitical analysis notably ignores China, and the fact that Trump pushing the EU to China would be the greatest geopolitical victory for China in history.

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