In January 2016, more than two years into the European Commission’s state aid investigation into the taxation of Apple in Ireland, the firm’s CEO Tim Cook landed in Brussels. There, he held his first meeting about the case with then European Competition Commissioner (and now Commission Vice-President) Margrethe Vestager.  By then, the probe had homed in on one issue that had already reshaped Apple’s Irish subsidiaries, rippled through two Irish budgets, and was about to trigger a wave of corporate restructuring among technology multinationals: where their intellectual property (IP) is located, and how the companies handling it are taxed. IP…

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