The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition that the European Union's highest court Tuesday delivered the 27-nation bloc a major victory in its years-long campaign to regulate the technology industry, ruling against Apple and Google in two landmark legal cases. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe says that the decisions, issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union, were seen as an important test of efforts in Europe to clamp down on the world's largest technology companies. In the Apple case, the court sided with an EU order from 2016 for Ireland to collect 13 billion euros in unpaid taxes from the company. Regulators determined that Apple had struck illegal deals with the Irish government that allowed the company to pay virtually nothing in taxes on its European business in some years. Apple won an earlier decision to strike down the order, a ruling that the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, appealed to the Court of Justice. In the Google case, the court agreed with the commission's 2017 decision to fine the company 2.4 billion euros for giving preferential treatment in Google search results to its own price-comparison shopping service over rival offerings. Google lost an appeal in 2021.