And American companies are absolutely dumbfounded when they try to play the “misplaced comma” card in the EU and they still get slapped down. It is a very Ameri

And American companies are absolutely dumbfounded when they try to play the “misplaced comma” card in the EU and they still get slapped down. It is a very American attitude — I always wondered what ST:TNG would have been like if Picard wasn’t always able to save the day by invoking some obscure sub paragraph of some obscure treaty. Note to Elon that if he launches lawyers into space it doesn’t kill them, he just ends up with a lot of lawyers in space. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ensigns_of_Command https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ensigns_of_Command The other aspect of EU law that always gets US companies is that penalties are large enough to actually be penalizing. In the US companies can basically ignore the law until they get caught, pay a token $100,000 or $1,000,000 fine (which sounds impressive in all the papers), then invent a new interpretation of the law and go do it again. In the EU the regulators start looking at percentages of income during the entire time the illegal activity occurred, so again the US companies are caught completely off guard when they get asked to forfeit billions of dollars.