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Maybe US companies should stop doing illegal things then.



Fines are a perverse incentive. If bureaucrats want money, they can pass laws that are ambiguous or contain arguable loopholes. Companies then engage in malicious compliance, which subverts the purpose of the law and prevents it from actually restoring competition, and then just pay the fine when the prosecution comes because that's less expensive than allowing that market to foster viable competitors that could subsequently break into the global market or demonstrate to other jurisdictions that antitrust rules can be effective. Meanwhile the bureaucrats are happy because they get billions of dollars in fine revenue even though the problem hasn't been solved.

What they should be doing is to regard this kind of antitrust violation as a manner of copyright or patent abuse and use the penalty of invalidating the perpetrator's copyrights and patents. Then you would get actual compliance, because the alternative is that TSMC could have a fab in Germany and start producing competing iPhones.




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