Apple slapped with French fine over this iPhone rule, but won't be forced to change it (yet)...

[iMore.com]

Apple has been fined just over 1 million euros for forcing developers in France to sign up to abusive commercial clauses. Full story from the iMore Blog...

 

[Up_And_Away]

Apple takes the view that anything like this is to appealed, period, if possible.
It doesn’t matter that 1m Euros is less than .001% of earnings (even less if you use free cash flow as the yardstick of Apple’s 2022 money pile). There’s other reasons why it would be simple to pay. The appeal legal cost will probably be multiple hundreds of thousands of Euros if not more. Just the legal cost to appeal may be more than the fine. Also, Apple has mega billions in the EU that sits in a poor performing bond market making much less than inflation. Off topic side note: This money is unable to be repatriated to the Cupertino HQ due to odd US tax laws (Apple like every other US company leaves it overseas and awaits the next repatriation tax holiday). This in part answers why you see Apple issue bonds(borrow money), around 80 billion dollars so far. One of the reasons is they have about 100 billion parked overseas. So, in effect, Apple is borrowing money against their own money. Crazy? No, in reality the money is at low rates, and the borrowed money is available/used in corporate operations. This makes the money more efficiently used than sitting overseas earning .5% to 2.5% in bonds.

Regardless, Apple will appeal if they can.