Tech Bros in Europe

It's not going well with the European Union, what with Google having to pay €2.4 billion in fines for monopolistic behavior:

The European Union's Court of Justice (ECJ) has dismissed Google's appeal of a €2.4 billion ($2.65 billion) 2017 antitrust ruling, finding it had abused its dominance in favor of its own Google Shopping service, diverting traffic that would otherwise have gone to rival comparison services.

The 2017 decision at the time was the culmination of a years-long antitrust investigation that began in 2010.

Alphabet already attempted, and failed, to get the 2017 decision overturned on appeal in 2021, when it claimed before the EU General Court that its treatment of searches on Google's shopping comparison service wasn't unfair. At the time it argued the consequences of the practice to the rivals were not so dire, pointing to differences in search traffic, which it claimed were not "substantial." But the General Court wasn't buying this, stating: "Those arguments take account only of the impact of the display of results from Google's comparison shopping service, without taking into account the impact of the poor placement of results from competing comparison shopping services in the generic results."

Google then appealed to Europe's top court, the ECJ. The final smackdown, in a decision delivered over 14 years after the probe began, dismissed all of Google's grounds of appeal, saying, among other things, that the search giant had "failed to meet the legal test for a duty to supply access to comparison shopping services."

Also, you see Apple having to pay Ireland €13 billion in back taxes, which the government of Ireland did not want to collect what amounts to about €2,450.00 for every person in the country.

If you are wondering why Ireland is on Apple's side in all of this, it's because the business model of the Irish state is to profit off of a race to the bottom.

Basically, they have decided that their role is to be a colonial possession of multinational corporations that operate in the EU.

The EU competition authority ruled that this was an illegal subsidy, and the ECJ, made that ruling final:

Apple has suffered a significant defeat after the EU’s top court ruled that the iPhone maker must pay 13 billion euros in back taxes, overturning an earlier decision in the Big Tech group’s favor.

The ruling relates to a 2016 case when the EU’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager said that Ireland had given the company an illegal sweetheart deal, amounting to a tax rate of less than 1 percent.

The European Court of Justice said on Tuesday in its final ruling that it “confirms the European Commission’s 2016 decision: Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid which Ireland is required to recover.”

A lower court had in 2020 quashed the commission’s order and the ECJ’s decision to overturn that ruling was unexpectedly decisive.

………

The Irish finance ministry said it would consider the ruling but added: “The Irish position has always been that Ireland does not give preferential tax treatment to any companies or taxpayers.”

The technical term for the statement by the FM is a, "Lie."

The case has been watched carefully across the bloc as a watershed moment over Big Tech’s tax affairs in Europe, with the EU’s efforts to probe the arrangements between companies and member states having previously suffered setbacks.

………

However, the ECJ on Tuesday affirmed the commission’s original finding that Apple’s tax structure in Ireland—which excluded the profits generated from the intellectual property licenses held by its international and European arms—amounted to state aid.

………

However, Dan Neidle, founder of the Tax Policy Associates think-tank, said the ECJ’s Apple decision would still have “significant implications” that will force member states and multinational companies to reconsider how profits are allocated between countries.

Neidle said: “It’s a massive victory for the commission—their strategy of using competition law and state aid to override domestic tax rules has succeeded. I and most observers thought it wouldn’t—we were wrong.”

If the various free trade deals were actually about free trade, the orgy of subsidies that we see directed toward companies, Amazon's attempted rat-F%$#ing of New York for example, and almost any sports franchise out there, would be explicitly banned.

Those deals are not really about free trade though, they are about labor arbitrage and rent seeking.