[TimPC]

It's insane that they think the deterrant to a single line of business should be based on the revenue of the business as a whole instead of that line of business. 0.5% of app store revenue would be far more reasonable than 0.5% of Apple revenue.

[Ghexor]

I think, in order to have the desired effect, the deterrant must be in proportion to the resources of the transgressor as a whole entity. If its not, Apple can afford to behave anticompetitively with their appstore, hold on to an illegal position of power and use that to extract revenue for the other lines of business that they're in.

Morally, if we fine violations to the speed limit in proportion to the context of the transgression only it will not adapt to the income of the transgressor. That makes it practically legal for rich people to drive as fast as they wish.

[TimPC]

I'd support fines for the whole business revenue if you can prove that's what the business is doing. Here it's pretty clear the app store is behaving anti-competitively to increase app store revenue. Apple doesn't sell more iPhones by making it harder to use Spotify on them.

[sircastor]

I follow your reasoning, but by the same reasoning we could say that Apple shouldn't internally fund projects with the revenue from other projects. Each project should be supported by its own income stream.

To function as a deterrent, it needs to represent a cost that a company is unwilling to tolerate.

[beeboobaa]

The point of a fine is to get a company to behave.

I'd prefer if they could just jail the executives instead, but since sadly companies are an effective shield against justice this will have to do.

[todd-davies]

Criminal sanctions in competition/antitrust law cases are an option in some jurisdictions, notably in the US and the UK (but not in the EU).

For an ageing but interesting case, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine_price-fixing_conspiracy

[todd-davies]

There are a few ways to think about this. One is deterrence based on cost-benefit analysis, which is essentially a game theoretic way to think about firm behaviour. The logic here would be to fine the firm enough to deter anti-competitive behaviour, as has been mentioned.

Another way to think about it, is to say that we care about safeguarding the process of competition itself. That could include ensuring that competition is fair, ensuring that firms can enter markets, ensuring consumers get to choose which firms to consume from, etc. There's lots of precedent for that in EU competition law [1]. Taking that view, Apple was using its dominant position to restrict the economic freedom of Spotify (and others) and thereby harming the process of competition. Specifically, it limited rival firms from "fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services" (as per the press release), thus harming competition.

All that to say, if we take the objective of EU competition law as being to prevent large firms from exercising power over smaller firms and to protect the process of competition in a general sense, then these big fines are easier to justify.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3166005

[deanishe]

> It's insane that they think the deterrant to a single line of business should be based on the revenue of the business

How is that "insane"?

It's pretty clear that Apple Music hadn't gone rogue.

[XajniN]

The law allows up to 10% of global revenue.