You believe that breaking them up is geopolitically infeasible but a fine larger than the GDP of Finland would fly?
On top of that, giant bureaucracies are great at "compliance". That isn't the same as doing the thing you actually wanted though.
You believe that breaking them up is geopolitically infeasible but a fine larger than the GDP of Finland would fly?
On top of that, giant bureaucracies are great at "compliance". That isn't the same as doing the thing you actually wanted though.
The UK could give Apple a choice: Either pay a fine exceeding the GDP of Finland, or stop being a monopoly, or every Apple senior executive will have an arrest warrant and the products will be seized on import.
To achieve the thing you wanted, word the law vaguely and have a judge interpret it. You know, the same way the law is applied to poors like you and me. Nobody gets off a murder by saying "Your Honour, when I stabbed that man to death, technically I didn't meet the criteria in point 3 subsection 12 and therefore I am innocent." Why should corporations get that privilege? (I note they may be found innocent of murder but guilty of something like manslaughter - which is fine! Different degrees of violation of the law can result in greater or lesser sentences. Proportionality is a good thing. Apple should only have to pay half the fine if the judge estimates they've done half what they should)
> pay a fine exceeding the GDP of Finland, or stop being a monopoly
Reaction from the US government would be swift and extreme, especially with this administration. 1000% tariffs on British exports or something like that...
But even under a normal/sane administration, doing something like this to an US tech megacorp would be unfeasible without a backlash that would outweigh any benefits.
> Either pay a fine exceeding the GDP of Finland, or stop being a monopoly, or every Apple senior executive will have an arrest warrant and the products will be seized on import.
That's what breaking them up is. "Stop being a monopoly" is breaking them up.
Leaving them in one piece and trying to pass a separate rule against every monopolistic practice they can come up with while they remain in one piece is an exercise in futility.
> Nobody gets off a murder by saying "Your Honour, when I stabbed that man to death, technically I didn't meet the criteria in point 3 subsection 12 and therefore I am innocent." Why should corporations get that privilege?
Some people do, in fact, e.g. because the evidence was seized unlawfully and the government's penalty for that is not getting to use it, or because the charges were filed in the wrong jurisdiction etc. This is why rich people often get away with things -- they have money to pay lawyers to trawl through thousands of pages of regulations to find the mistake the government made or bamboozle the jury or the court. See e.g. O.J. Simpson.
But the problem in cases like this is much harder than that, because there is no murder without a body. It isn't a normal thing to be having to decide if the person who killed someone is guilty of murder because it isn't a normal thing to be the person who killed someone.
Whereas it is a normal thing for companies to sell things for money and enter into contracts etc. Which means you're not trying to decide if they did something wrong in an outrageous event that happens zero times in the median person's life, you're trying to decide if they did something wrong in any of the millions of transactions they take part in every day.
Is requiring a fee or the use of an identification service in order to publish an app just recovering their costs, or is it a ploy to inhibit people from doing it? Is preventing third party software from performing certain system functions a security measure, or a means to prevent competitors making an app store that actually functions properly?
You can't be getting into the weeds like that or their lawyers will eventually come up with something the government accepts as the former while it still has the effect of the latter. You have to remove the structural incentive they have to do it to begin with, which comes from these separate products all being tied together within the same company.