This is not a fine, tho. It's just the amount that Apple would have paid in taxes, if the special deal didn't exist.
The EU is not imposing any fines on Apple. They're just ordering Ireland to collect the taxes owed to them (Ireland), since the tax deal was found to be unfair/illegal.
One solution you could use to get around this weird design decision, is to use the reader mode in Firefox (I'm not sure what is the alternative for other browsers).
I think that's the wrong analogy. A more correct one would be "Should we blame a car company for a broken engine, that was modified after it was sold to you?".
A kernel level driver from a 3rd party is something that you willingly add to the OS, it wasn't there.
Just because windows allow you to do it, doesn't mean you should.
I mean, you can apply some dangerous mods to your car's engine, but you probably shouldn't, and if you do, it's your responsibility, not the car company.
Google is not promising this out of the goodness of their heart. They're just getting ahead of what the EU is planning to mandate [0], and doing that to get some good marketing while they're at it.
So, while Google's track record leaves a lot to be desired, in this, I think they'll keep their promise, either because they actually care, or because the EU will force them to. Either way, we, the end users, will benefit from it.
And this will apply to all electronic device makers. That's probably why Samsung also increased their updates policy to five years as well.
Microsoft could still work with their partners to implement this. Yes, the PC market tend to be fragmented, but what I assume would happen is that some ARM PCs will have the hardware acceleration, and for those it would lead to a much better performance. But, for the ones without hardware acceleration, it would just fallback to software emulation.
And as time goes on, more and more OEMs would probably favor adding the hardware support because people would prefer to buy the ones with faster x86 emulation.
The EU is not imposing any fines on Apple. They're just ordering Ireland to collect the taxes owed to them (Ireland), since the tax deal was found to be unfair/illegal.