Did they really break the law? I’m not a fan of Apple and their aggressive walled gardens and general hostility. But I feel like the tax optimization with Ireland is well known to everyone and wasn’t an issue until now. It seems dishonest to go back and demand retroactive taxes afterwards. And I bet they aren’t the only company in this situation so are they being singled out unfairly?
State aid to private companies is outright illegal in the EU. It's a matter of finding out how far back this continuous state aid goes to figure out the total.
You only get caught at the end of the illegal activity, but you're responsible for all of it.
My EU country has the concept of "done continuously" to any criminal code article, including tax evasion and all other provisions, and I'm pretty sure it's an EU-wide concept, where penalties go up by a percentage if the crimes were done continuously over a period of time. So breaking the law continuously also matters, not only at the time of getting caught.
What I don't agree with is Apple getting fined. Apple needs to pay the proper taxes for the entire period of getting state aid, but Ireland should get the penalty for subsidising a private company, am infringement procedure should determine that.
They broke the law indeed. It was a legally untested tax structure that was found to be illegal all along. This also is not the first time the European courts have told member states to stop preferential treatment in tax deals.
It's funny that you say it was well known to everyone and also wasn't an issue. It was well known because precisely because it was an issue.
If a company and country are dishonest about the tax deals they illegally make it's pretty dishonest to call it dishonest to demand the taxes are back payed.
This ruling applies to all the illegal tax schemes European countries have been using. So there are definitely other companies getting the bill as well.
It wasn't even well known until very late into the 2000s (even early 2010) when Apple actually started to make a lot of money and got a lot more scrutiny.
Because it is pretty simple, you don't really care about a struggling company or one that just gets by, even if their marginal tax rate is lower than it is supposed to be, since there isn't much to be taxed the difference is minimal in any case.
However, if the company is extremely successful and makes big money the difference is absurd and it actually becomes unfair for everyone (both other companies who have to play by the rules, and citizens who get taxed more than a filthy rich corp).
And this is the real reason it "became" a problem and took a while to resolve. Had Apple stayed a relatively small company with small sales numbers in the EU (and thus small profits) the deal would have probably not have much scrutiny and even if it had, it probably wouldn't have gotten any focus.
It would have cost more money in legislators time than it would have brought in anyway, even though the deal was fundamentally unfair. But life is generally unfair, so it doesn't matter that much.
According to the EU's highest court they did and that's all that matters. I think you're trying to say that that if you or the US believes that the EU is wrong regardless of EU decisions the US is justified in attacking.
My original comment is pointing out that the current admin seems willing to bully other countries using international trade.
So the EU goes after US tech companies, US tech companies flock to Trump, Trump attacks the EU
> According to the EU's highest court they did and that's all that matters
Its like saying Euros shouldn't be upset by american tariffs because they are legal per american laws and thats all that matters.
I still don't get why Euros are so freaking upset that USA decided it wants to operate differently. Why doesn't usa have that right.
edit: for butthurt euros calling me names below, Apple's claim is that The EU did not have specific rules in place prohibiting Ireland’s tax policies when Apple benefited from them. It even won its appeal on EU court in 2020 on that basis.
Its time for countries like India to claw back taxes that european companies didn't pay during colonization.
> USA can makeup whatever laws it wants and apply them retroactively too
Which shows how little understanding you have of this topic. This isn't a new law, at all. The tax has always been owed, because state aid / state subsidy has always been illegal in the EU. No new law is being applied retroactively here.
It's not a retroactive law. It's a law not being followed. If you decide to not file your taxes properly and need to pay all the tax you owe after getting found out the law did not change.
i am talking about all the hilarious whining thats goin on over tarrifs and what not after they just genocided whole continents. Trump might be the biggest bufoon of all time but he is giving euros a little taste of their own medicine and its amazing to watch.
Euros need to accept their lower status in the world due to their economic decline. They are still hanging on to some racist colonial thinking they are still the top dog.
They are same as phillipines or bangladesh when it comes to relationship with USA. They don't get some special ally status bases on their racist ideas.
They will have to pay similar back taxes to former colonies soon now that they don't have big brother protecting them.
I think you are ignorant about law in general and European institutions. European Court of Justice is established in 1952. European Economic Community is established in 1957. Ireland joined the European communities in 1972.
The court order is just, as Apple didn't pay fair amount of taxes from whole EU operations. This makes it an EU matter. They just need to pay their taxes.
I think big tech deserves anti trust regulation and action because it is good for a competitive market that actually puts customers first. They’re too big and powerful and abuse their power to hurt fair competition. But I think the type of aggressive action you’re talking about - and the motivation to do it solely to weaken America - will open up a lot of destructive actions back and forth.
America choosing to spend less money on Ukraine, pushing for resolution to a conflict that has resulted in mass deaths for Ukrainian males, and renegotiating tariffs doesn’t deserve the kind of hysterical overreaction I’m seeing from Europeans. In the end, if it escalates to open warfare on each other’s economies rather than a reset of trade agreements, it’ll damage both the EU and US to China’s benefit.
For the moment, and only because it wants to be the global hegemon, and I promise you that the CCP is not isolationist and will do far worse to Europe than even Trump, for all his destructive and inflammatory idiocy, will do.
Sonehow I doubt it. China was from time immemorial a nation of merchants. They excel in trade. Even their communist experiment, from a historical perspective, quickly gave in for them to revert to what they do best.
The US has a history of fucking over other countries for their own benefit instead.
I am not saying that EU should align with China or any such thing. There is no reason to not rely in them for trading however.
Boeing still makes really good planes in general. The 737 Max is very popular still, with 300 orders even after the Alaska door incident. Sure the Airbus equivalent got twice the orders in that time, but my point is Boeing is still highly respected and trusted by airlines. The 777X is very anticipated by airlines flying long routes, and has over 500 orders. And Boeing still makes the F18 super hornet.
Thanks for sharing. That’s a much longer list than I expected. It certainly looks like they have lots of manufacturing capabilities. I do wonder if they’re the right company for software and AI, however that figures into defense.
It’s not unsafe for anyone to visit the US either. Unless you’re violating the law in some way, like presenting false documents or overstaying a visa - in which case there would be consequences like in any other country. Sure mistakes can happen on rare occasions, like in any country, but “arbitrary” detention isn’t a thing. That’s just sensationalism from a biased news media that has no idea why anyone was denied or detained, since that isn’t public information.
I don’t know if you’ve read about it but apparently if a trans woman has “F” in her passport and a border agent determines that she was previously a man, that’s now considered fraudulent and grounds for detention and deportation.
Overstaying a visa in any other (developed) country does not result in this kind of detention. These people are not even being given due process. I’m sure each of them is detained for some mistake in their paperwork, but some of these stories are really not flattering to the ICE.
> Overstaying a visa in any other (developed) country does not result in this kind of detention.
The US doesn't have a monopoly on immigration horror stories: Australian immigration illegally detained an Australian citizen for 10 months. [0] They illegally deported another Australian citizen to the Philippines, and when they discovered their mistake, their initial response was to cover it up rather than try to rectify it. [1]
> What is happening now: people being critical of Trump are being rejected, legal visa holders are being detained because of the scale of the abuse.
The agencies don’t reveal reasons why someone was denied or detained, so there is no evidence whatsoever that someone was detained for being critical of Trump. The claim that this happened is from Philippe Baptiste, a French minister for higher education who has been attacking America continuously in a bid to attract researchers from the US.
Yes absolutely. It’s odd to see people here suggesting Mexico as an alternative based on safety of travelers. It’s a giveaway that they’re simply being opportunistic in attacking America due to their opposition to the administration, rather than anything actually safety related.
As an example, this article from 2025 about a family of foreigners being shot dead also lists numerous other recent examples of tourists being killed, and links to those stories:
Those aren’t even the only ones, and physical harm isn’t the only type of crime foreigners can experience in Mexico either. Moving a conference there for safety makes no sense whatsoever.
There are certainly plenty of areas in Mexico that are dangerous (typically along the US border and drug routes), but it's not as though everywhere in the country is more dangerous than everywhere in the US. E.g., I've been to academic conferences in plenty of US cities that rank among the most dangerous in the world (Baltimore, Oakland, Philly, etc.), [0] as well as Mexico City, which decidedly does not rank among the most dangerous -- let alone the resort destinations. The reality is, "family on vacation murdered in cartel territory" is going to draw a lot more media attention than "family on vacation robbed in New Orleans" or "overwhelming majority of families have perfectly safe vacations". You can't judge by sensationalist articles how safe a place actually is, let alone an entire nation the size of Mexico.
This index unironically puts countries that practice government censorship in the category of full democracies. Sorry but this isn't a democracy index - it's just a progressive index.
Jet fuel is about 7 pounds a gallon. So we’re talking about something like 4000 gallons. A bus is something 40 feet by 10 feet by 10 feet, which is like 20000 gallons. So it’s about a fifth of a school bus.
> The US is clearly demonstrating it is an unreliable partner in defence.
This feels like exaggeration to me. How is the US an ‘unreliable partner’? Has any country had parts for their existing defense purchases restricted? This type of reaction to the US choosing to not spend its own taxpayer money or military equipment on a far away conflict doesn’t make sense.
If anything, the truth is the opposite. The other countries in NATO have been unreliable partners that did not meet their spending requirements. For example, Germany, France, and Canada all underspent but benefited from the US taxpayer spending a lot.
> Western nations cannot buy into a platform when its supplier might go from being a democratic part of the West to aligning with dictators and autocrats literally overnight.
The US is not aligning with dictators. Pushing for a resolution to a conflict that is costing the world hundreds of billions, not to mention huge amounts of Ukrainian lives, is the only reasonable path. The EU has literally no solution for this conflict - just complaints that America is now seeking resolution and doesn’t want to keep wasting money or lives.
