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 The European Commission (EC) reportedly delayed regulatory penalty announcements against Apple and Meta this week as it accelerates its push for a trade deal with the US. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal said the move led to concern from European Parliament lawmakers that political factors are influencing the body's regulatory decisions.
The EU is said to have initially planned to announce cease-and-desist orders against Apple and Meta on Tuesday and reportedly told at least one of the companies about the timing in advance. The WSJ says the decision to postpone the announcement came shortly before EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefcovic met with US officials in Washington on Monday, the official's first in-person talks with the US since President Donald Trump's 90-day tariff pause.
On Tuesday, an EC spokesperson said technical work had been completed on the cases, but no dates had been announced. "We're currently working on the adoption of final decisions in the short term," the spokesman reportedly said.
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That's the end of a class-action lawsuit that started over four years ago, when two American plaintiffs complained that HP displayed "strike-through prices" on its store that weren't actually real, thus inflating the discount that it looked like they were receiving. According to the report on Ars Technica, the plaintiffs allege that HP lied about how much quantity was available, in the familiar "only one left at this price" sense.
I say allegedly, because this is a civil suit, not a criminal case of false advertising, and HP has admitted no wrongdoing or liability as a condition of the settlement. It's basically a $4 million "leave me alone" check. Though the plaintiffs did accuse HP of violating the US FTC's deceptive pricing laws, it doesn't appear that any actual law enforcement is involved. And it's not as if these practices are isolated. The "FOMO" and time pressure sales tactic is omnipresent online, new variations of sales techniques that I remember from the infomercial days and before.
One personal bugbear of mine is a little company called Lenovo, the largest seller of laptops on the planet by volume. Whenever it announces a new ThinkPad model I truly, genuinely don't know how much it costs, despite covering its products for over
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