You’ve clearly never interacted with a regulator before. When a regulator send you a letter with difficult questions, there is an extremely strong implication that a failure to answer those questions correctly will lead to more difficult questions, and, undoubtedly, official investigations.

You don’t want an official investigation, they are a complete nightmare that eat up months of work hours. Much better to spend a couple of days making sure you can give the correct answers on the first pass. Unless of course you genuinely believe the regulators are pushing beyond their remit, but know you’re voluntary signing up for an expensive and protracted fight.

It is incredibly naive to suggest that someone with that power "sending a letter asking questions" would be remotely similar to you or I doing the same.

The EU has an long tradition of "conversations" and "questions" with an unstated "give the right answer and you can avoid an unpleasant official action".

You're right there is no official casework. That is also entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether or not Apple caved under pressure.

> "give the right answer and you can avoid an unpleasant official action"

You are thinking of the mob. Thankfully here in the US official actions are generally done in view of the public.

No. We're thinking about a government that doesn't rush into potentially irreversible actions without working out a solution for a problem with the parties involved.

Eh? No; the US works broadly the same. For instance, a rather amusing recent one: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/31/tesla-reportedly-facing-doj-...

The “probe” here would be, at least in the first instance, usually mostly letters asking questions. Note that it is “reportedly”; the media didn’t find this out because the DOJ had a banner on its website saying “we are investigating an alleged glass house”. That comes later, if things are not resolved.

The reason we know EU officials has spoken to Apple is because at least one has said so in public.

_Most_ regulatory enforcement, in practice, is “letters asking questions”. The formal cases you see are generally where the response to the letters was unsatisfactory.

(In some cases this is itself somewhat formalised.)