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EU is a rich market of 450 million people (Europe is 750). That's a lot of customers.
This is it. Facebook (or Meta, can't recall which) put a value of something like $40 per user per year on their users' data. With a population of 450M, I don't imagine any company to just walk away from $18B per year when they only get these $1-2B fines every few years.
They probably think of it as a tax that they actually have to pay, or a cost of doing business.
The costs of working around/complying with those restrictions are likely lower than the amount of money they can get through doing business.
But also most EU laws about privacy and electronics apply to EU folks outside the EU. You'd have to essentially start a cold war.
Leaving would also leave room for competitors to grow big. The market is still there and if American companies won’t deliver other companies will.
They could leave.
- They are still making money
B) If they leave, someone will come in who can play by the very reasonable rules, and then the big company will have a harder time coming back in.
It'd give space to grow to potential competitors who'd be able to outsell them on service quality since they were developed in a minimum quality requirement environment
Because they make more money than they’re paying in fines. They also may be making more money violating laws than they’re paying in fines, but that’s how they’ll have to determine how they conduct business.
Basically - and this is mostly for tech but I suspect it applies to other markets - the US is the single largest market. “Europe” is second, depending on how you want to define it, but even just the EU is a very big market. China is big and growing, and most companies are trying their best to keep growth there. Asia collectively could be huge, but the attempts to collectivize Asia have not worked out well, historically speaking.
But the takeaway is that a company will exit s market if it’s losing money, generally speaking. No one is sacrificing earnings to make sure Belgians have access to the latest phones out of the goodness of their hearts.
The EU can slap around big companies like apple because they are not headquartered there. Thus they can impose rules on their products. Granted apple will make slightly less money but they are still making plenty of profit from EU residents.
The US can't do the same to apple since Apple is headquartered in the US, and can leave the US. The US gets tons of money (and bribes) from apple and companies similar to it (Amazon, Microsoft, etc).
TLDR, the EU gets little money from apple, US gets big money from apple, and GDP figures (and all people care about is the economy when electing presidents)
We can and should do the same thing to Apple.
When did we forget as a nation that we can break up any business we want to? That we, as citizens, get to decide shit like this?
Jesus, vote for some people who haven't forgotten this basic American history.
Give me someone who'd actually do that lol. People are so hell bent on economic figures that we'd never see a prez willing to break up big conglomerates or monopolies.
Just follow the money buddy..
I really wish those laws were in effect here in the US. IIRC, one of them is that all devices have to come with their own charger. Just got a new phone the other day and the fucker only came with a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-A to USB-C adapter thing. No brick. I have no chargers yet that have a USB-C port so I have to charge it through my PS5. And it doesn't fast charge the phone. Until now, every phone I've had came with the charger brick and was fully featured to support every function the phone has (like QC).
You've got that backwards, they specifically dont supply charger plugs with to reduce ewaste.
Plus they tell you on the product page whats in the box, so you could buy a charger in preparation if you need one.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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