Apple vs the Law

The EU is fundamentally a centre-right, liberalist, pro-business coalition, but what that means is that it is pro-competition. What's really impressive is that it seems to mostly refrain from devolving into protectionist policies, giving no preferential treatment to European businesses against international (intercontinental?) competitors, despite strong populist tendencies in certain member states.

Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.

> just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead

Temu is under active investigation for breaching these laws, anyone operating within EU is subject to those laws, not just European companies (e.g. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-ope...)

Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.

Instead what's happening is that European alternatives (the kind that's actually good, not the kind that's European and half as good) don't exist and the incentives to build one shrink because any scaling company is instantly hamstrung.

Let me ask you guys something else, if EU hates large monopolist companies so much as you claim, then why are all its car companies monopolistic mega conglomerates that rule the world like Volkswagen, Stellantis, Daimler Benz, BMW, and Renault? Where's EU's equivalent of Tesla if they supposedly hate all these big companies?

I'll tell you why: Just like the US, the capital controlled EU also supports its domestic monopolies and only bitches about foreign monopolies in sectors they don't control and threaten their economic hegemony. That's the cold hard truth, everything else is just political hot air and virtue signaling for brownie points, and I'm pissed people are not only buying it but also parroting it when the goal to monopolize business sectors is as strong in EU corporations as it is in US and Chinese ones.

Europe is just more stricter now with controlling large (mostly foreign) corporations since its own economy lost a lot of ground to the US and Chinese ones (it has now half the real GDP it had 2 decades ago), and since it can't create new large companies, all it can do now is protecting what it has left from foreign companies taking over their turf. The upshot being that a lot of those rules are congruent with the consumer protections which also end up globally favoring consumers abroad.

We don't need cars from fascists.

Really? Because look up on the history of VW, BMW, Porsche, Fiat, etc and their founding families, some of who still own a large part of the shares of those companies today. Most of them worked with fascists no problem, some by force of the era some by opportunity but none of them opposed them.

You see this is the typical European hypocrisy that I dislike. Pointing fingers that Elon is somehow a fascist cause he raised his arm once, but Porsche or BMW who used slave labor from work camps is somehow not fascist now because ... reasons I guess.

Explain me that with logic and reason, and not with the "Elon is a fascist because reddit told me he is".