Well, you can either try to comply with the spirit of the law and work with the EU to clarify, or you can maliciously comply with the letter and get fined.
I'm not a lawyer, but I didn't need to be one to see the 0.5 €/user/yr fee and think "yeeeeah that won't fly".
Or maybe Apple's legal team should hire me to advise on the spirit of the law.
Dude, malicious compliance is not a real legal term and if Apple is charged, it's going to be for non-compliance, because even if you comply "maliciously", if you are compliant, then you are compliant. Either the text of the law matters, or it really doesn't, but out of the institutions that form the government of the European Union, the EC is the one with exclusive legislative initiative; the EU Parliament doesn't write the laws it is asked to vote on, nor do they have the power to compel (only ask) the EC to write a law so if anyone within the EU can write what they mean into the text of a law since they're also the ones who will be enforcing it, it is exactly the European Commission. The EC seems convinced that Apple's reading of the text is just wrong, and most likely the dust won't settle on this until they take this to the CJEU.
Well, Apple says it complied, the EU says it didn't. If the letter of the law was the whole law, this would be objective, but apparently it isn't, since they're disagreeing. As you say, there is the "reading of the text", and yes, it probably needs the CJEU.
Yeah, unfortunately when there is a dispute in how the law should be read, it goes to the courts. I will say that Apple is at a massive disadvantage even if it's possible for them to win in court because I don't know exactly how the CJEU does things, but generally here in America, there is some debate in judicial philosophies between whether you follow the text, the text and nothing but the text of the law, if you follow the text and the original intent of Congress at the time that they wrote the text, or if you read into the intent of the text and what the text was trying to accomplish.
As far as original intent goes, the EC wrote it, and very recently. There won't be much of a debate if it comes down to that, but if the CJEU is inclined to go straight to the text and question the parties on that, Apple might actually have a decent shot at beating the EU in court, but then theoretically the EC can just rewrite the law and try again and there really isn't anyone that could stop them so… yeah.
The EU is undergoing something of a regime change right now so it is possible this won’t just be one bad decade for Apple (and Google, Facebook, ByteDance, etc.), but odds are low.
I'm not a lawyer, but I didn't need to be one to see the 0.5 €/user/yr fee and think "yeeeeah that won't fly".
Or maybe Apple's legal team should hire me to advise on the spirit of the law.