The "special deal" that keeps getting referenced is political rhetoric. The Commission may be right that Europe should no longer allow this sort of thing but they're wrong to retroactively implement a new tax system.

There seems to be confusion in the press about how Ireland's tax system works. The 0.5% is being presented in certain parts of the press as something Ireland and Apple could have negotiated, but there was no negotiation. Ireland has a 12.5% corporate tax rate but it's long followed a normal policy of not placing that on profits that have already been taxed elsewhere. So the €13bn that the Commission wants Ireland to collect is money that was taxed in every country in the EMEA. It's the profits that Apple made from selling its hardware and software in that region. Profits that were subject to sales tax and corporate tax in all of the countries that Apple operates in, then brought back to its headquarters in Cork (which is a legit HQ employing around 6000 people, not just a letterbox) where it gets to sit without being taxed as earnings made in Europe, not Ireland. In other words, the Commission wants Apple EMEA in Ireland to be considered a fully Irish multinational, operating throughout the EMEA. But this has never really been the case in the past. So to retroactively claim it and give it to the Irish government, which didn't earn it, is wrong and I'll bet that the European Court will agree.

With all of that in mind, however, I think maybe The Commission is right to want this as a European tax policy going forward. Maybe companies operating with headquarters in the EU should be considered fully European and their profits should be taxed separately in the countries where their headquarters are. But if that approach is followed then Europe's going to have to drastically change its tax system. Double taxation will just make products more expensive in Europe. So what we should really have is a pooled tax system and budget where the profits from an iPhone sold in Croatia is taxed in Ireland at a set EU rate and then redistributed in the EU budget. But The Commission is shooting itself in the foot if it plans to do this without reaching agreement on a new system, because countries like Ireland, The Netherlands and Luxembourg that can afford a lower corporate tax rate will just continue to get richer than bigger industrial economies because of it. It's already been impossible to agree standardised corporate tax rates in Europe, imagine how much more difficult it would become if countries the size of Ireland, The Netherlands and Luxembourg were taxing companies as big as their economies at the full 12-15% rate for profits they made elsewhere?

I agree that Europe needs a new system and that this weird corporate tax policy that's being going on is wrong but countries like Germany can't laugh away the idea of a full fiscal union with pooled bonds, that would be beneficial to smaller countries that sometimes suffer from the Euro's imbalances (a mechanism that every other currency in the world has) and then ask those countries to agree to give up their low corporate tax rates. There has to be some reciprocity. Europe is either together or apart.