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It’s a bad day for big tech in the EU. After rejecting Google’s appeal of a $2.7 billion antitrust fine, Europe’s highest court ruled that Apple must pay back its €13 billion ($14.4 billion) Irish tax break deemed illegal by the EU Commission way back in 2016. 

The decision by the European Court of Justice overturns an earlier 2020 decision by a lower court in Apple’s favor. “[The decision] confirms the European Commission’s 2016 decision: Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid which Ireland is required to recover,” the judges wrote. 

In a statement to the Financial Times, Apple said the EU was “trying to retroactively change the rules and ignore that, as required by international tax law, our income was already subject to taxes in the US.” 

Apple’s effective tax rate for revenue earned in Europe was an effective 1 percent on European profits and as low as .005 percent in 2014. Because the deal gave Apple a “significant advantage” over the competition, the EU Commission ordered it to pay back “illegal state aid” over the ten-year period before it began investigating its tax practices. 

The decision follows several setbacks for the European Commission against US corporations. Last year, the ECJ ruled that Amazon wouldn’t be required to pay €250 million ($276 million) in back taxes to Luxembourg and lost a similar case to Starbucks in the Netherlands. So despite today’s wins for the EU, those decisions could haunt future EU cases against big tech around tax havens in individual member states. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-ordered-to-pay-back-its-illegal-144-billion-irish-tax-break-110041387.html?src=rss

A SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying the four private astronauts of the Polaris Dawn mission has launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the early hours of September 10 after a few weeks of delays. The mission was scheduled to lift off at the end of August but was postponed first due to technical issues, then because of poor weather conditions forecasted for the crew’s return. On board are Jared Isaacman — the billionaire who funded the mission — retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Scott “Kidd” Poteet, and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. They’ll attempt several firsts during the five-day flight, including the first-ever commercial spacewalk.

That attempt will also mark the first spacewalk from a Dragon capsule. Among Polaris Dawn’s other goals is to send its crew farther than anyone has traveled since the Apollo program, targeting an altitude of about 870 miles from Earth. The journey will take the capsule and its crew briefly into the Van Allen radiation belt.

Polaris Dawn is meant to be the first of three human spaceflight missions under Isaacman’s Polaris Program. Its crew will put SpaceX’s new Extravehicular Activity space suit to its most important test yet, as they’ll all wear it for protection against the vacuum of space when the Dragon’s doors open for the spacewalk. The spacewalk will take place at an elliptical orbit roughly 435 miles above Earth’s surface, and two crew members will leave the capsule.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/polaris-dawn-is-finally-headed-to-space-for-its-groundbreaking-civilian-mission-093346616.html?src=rss

Google has lost a seven-year battle with the European Commission as the EU’s highest court upheld a $2.7 billion antitrust fine against the search giant, Reuters reported. Antitrust regulators originally levied the penalty against Google in 2017 for favoring its own shopping service against local rivals. 

“Google’s strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn’t just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals,” EU commissioner Margrethe Vestager said at the time. “Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors.”

Google lost its first appeal with a lower court in 2021, sending the appeal to Luxembourg’s Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The company argued that it was being punished for its dominant position in the market and that the original decision “erred in law by treating quality improvements… as abusive.” 

However, the CJEU judges upheld the lower court’s decision that the company is allowed to have a dominant position but not to abuse it. “In particular, the conduct of undertakings in a dominant position that has the effect of hindering competition on the merits and is thus likely to cause harm to individual undertakings and consumers is prohibited,” they noted. 

An unnamed Google spokesperson has already responded to the decision, saying the company is “disappointed” with the judgment. They added “this judgment relates to a very specific set of facts. We made changes back in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision. Our approach has worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services.”

Google is also fighting a legal battle in the EU that could force it to sell parts of its adtech businesses over similar arguments that it favors its own services over those of competitors. The EU commission found preliminarily that since Google is unlikely to change its behavior, only the “mandatory divestment” of part of its services would address competition concerns. All told, Google has accumulated 8.25 billion euros ($9.12 billion) in EU antitrust fines over the last ten years.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-loses-its-seven-year-fight-against-27-billion-eu-antitrust-fine-090638804.html?src=rss