You’ve clearly never interacted with a regulator before. When a regulator send you a letter with difficult questions, there is an extremely strong implication that a failure to answer those questions correctly will lead to more difficult questions, and, undoubtedly, official investigations.

You don’t want an official investigation, they are a complete nightmare that eat up months of work hours. Much better to spend a couple of days making sure you can give the correct answers on the first pass. Unless of course you genuinely believe the regulators are pushing beyond their remit, but know you’re voluntary signing up for an expensive and protracted fight.

It is incredibly naive to suggest that someone with that power "sending a letter asking questions" would be remotely similar to you or I doing the same.

The EU has an long tradition of "conversations" and "questions" with an unstated "give the right answer and you can avoid an unpleasant official action".

You're right there is no official casework. That is also entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether or not Apple caved under pressure.

_Most_ regulatory enforcement, in practice, is “letters asking questions”. The formal cases you see are generally where the response to the letters was unsatisfactory.

(In some cases this is itself somewhat formalised.)

Or maybe Apple is not infallible, they took a shot because they are very arrogant and thought they could get away with it, and it failed miserably because now there is a law which makes their abusive behaviors illegal?

> That only makes sense if we assume Apple’s world class legal team didn’t see what every lay person could.

Apple banned Epic the day before DMA came into effect when doing this sort of thing was still legal, they 100% saw this. They did probably bet on the chance EU would overlook it if they did it before the law came into effect, they lost that bet but they thought it was worth a try.

I sure that Apple world class legal team saw everything you think they saw. But thing is, Apples legal team only provides legal _advise_, they don’t make decisions like this. There’s absolutely nothing preventing a senior leader getting perfectly good legal advice, and choosing to simply ignore it.

After all, legal advice can usually be summed up as “if you do anything, someone can fuck you”, and do nothing isn’t a good business strategy.

Companies often push their luck with regulators, because sometimes it works, and, as here, the consequences for failure often aren’t significant. For practical purposes Apple’s back where they were a week ago; from their point of view why _not_ chance their arm?

> That only makes sense if we assume Apple’s world class legal team didn’t see what every lay person could

Legal doesn't make decisions like this. That's not what they are paid to do.

Legal advises the executives of the consequences of decisions like this.

And if there's one thing that you should expect from people in positions of incredible power (executives), it's that they often believe that they are immune to the consequences of their decisions.

Most of the time they are right. Sometimes, they are not.