Italian Competition Authority Fines Apple $115M for Abusing Dominant Position

It is a nationalistic thing. When foreign governments fine "American" companies, they get all up in arms, while constantly asking the US Government to provide better consumer protections and promote competition.

This position commonly ignores that these fines are against these companies position within the market for which they're fined. Meaning that the EU will look at the EU profits and fine relative to those, so they aren't fining the "American" side/profits of the company but rather their "EU" (or Italian in this case) balance sheet.

You shouldn't be surprised. Almost every single story involving the EU and Apple that I've seen over the past few years was full of low effort responses and generic rants about the EU by people who clearly haven't read past the title, especially when it comes to fines.

Take your pick: "EU is fining us to finance itself", "EU can't innovate", "I can't believe that EU is fining Apple for [gross misunderstanding of the situation]"

I think people would sympathize more if it was something like "Apple makes choosing a different default browser or email client unnecessarily cumbersome" --

instead of "Apple makes you double-opt-in to sharing your private data with even more advertisers"

I don’t think it’s surprising. The ideal setup for many people here is an OS that gives them control over what they run and over their data.

An App Store that restrict us from running the application we want is bad. An App Store that prevents applications from tracking us is good. The former restricts our freedom, the latter restricts the freedom of developers who want to take advantage of our data.

It's almost like the stories on HN always attract more nay-sayers/detractors/negative nancies than positive ones, so if you just go by "general vibe of the comment section by submission theme", it'll always look like HN has split personality disorder, while in reality HN is composed of a wide range of diverse individuals :)

Unlikely because services in the EU have to be offered without barriers to everyone across all member states.

No, they are punishing because the ATT pop-up is not enough to comply with privacy rules, requiring 3rd party apps to have a secondary pop-up to be compliant (which Apple's own apps wouldn't need since they don't use ATT).

So it's more that Apple's ATT is not compliant with stricter privacy rules, not the opposite...

As far as I can understand, the fine is for having a prompt for 3rd party apps, but not apple's own apps. Then I'm not sure because even to me, the wording used by the authority is not entirely clear, but the issue would lie in a different treatment reserved for 3rd parties compared to 1st party apps

> What happens if Apple just exits the Italian market? They can create their own Apple competitor, I guess.

My guess is that if they want to do that, they'd also need to leave the European market as a whole, as many countries share similar laws and regulations, besides the ones that applied across the entire European Union. And since Europe seems to represent ~25% total revenue in 2025, that feels like a highly unlikely choice for them to do, considering they're a public company and have obligations to the shareholders.

It's about 3rd party vs apple's own.

> What happens if Apple just exits the Italian market?

They can’t.

If they did, the company (and thus shareholders) would lose money. Shareholders would vote out the board, and the new board would appoint a CEO who would promptly re-enter the Italian market.

This is why corporations get slapped around by regulators everywhere, even though on the surface, the regulators need the company far more than the other way round.

> no year goes by without Italy imposing random >100m€ fines for 2-3 american tech companies. whenever they need money

Since you apparently know, how large would a 100M EUR injection into the Italian budget for 2026 actually be, relatively to the other things?

You're saying they're doing this because they need money, but wouldn't changing the tax rates be more effective at this? 100M feels like a piss in the ocean, when you talk about a country's budget, but since you seem to imply Italy is doing this survive, would be nice to know what ratio this fine represents of their budget, which I'm guessing you have in front of you already?

This, I think, is the real answer why this is happening. The motivation behind these huge fines on large U.S. tech companies by EU countries is actually "we need revenue", not "we must protect our users". I would expect this to become another source of strain between the EU and the US as the EU economy continues to atrophy. Especially so if the U.S. economy weakens, too.

You do not, under any circumstances, have to defend a $4 trillion company.

It's the EU way. The only area where they produce world-leading innovation is regulatory regimes, so gotta use it to hit up American tech companies like an ATM.

What about profit in Italy?

Relative amounts don’t make it right or wrong.

EU privacy regulations and the GDPR are a complete farce. You'll notice that the EU's own government websites are littered with cookie banners. They want the data just as bad as everybody else.

The goal was not in any way to protect privacy, but rather to extract rent from American tech companies.

Don't you find it excessive to imply the above regarding a G7 country?

> OK now slap the wrists of Alphabet and Meta.

Google is probably next (Antitrust case(s)). AFAIK the EU is currently probing a case.

And before the Nationalists get mad again: If I sell in the US I'm naturally obliged to follow US rules and regulations. I wouldn't even think twice about this. The same is true in other markets. So for the Single Market: If you play on European turf, you play by European rules.