When the European Commission charged this week that Ireland’s sweetheart tax treatment of Apple amounted to an illegal corporate subsidy, the company said that it had done nothing wrong. Apple executives might have added that whatever they did, they were not alone.

Corporate tax strategies intended to minimize global taxes, by hook or by crook, are by now standard practice. Google and Facebook move money through Ireland to lower their taxes. Starbucks uses the Netherlands, a practice that is under review by Europe as well.

“The commission picked up a case which is quite common in terms of tax planning,” said Pascal Saint-Amans, who runs the Center for Tax Policy and Administration at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the policy advisory organization of the world’s advanced nations.

The question is whether this sort of strategy — as common to multinational companies as filing a tax return every year — can truly be stopped. What hangs in the balance is whether governments can continue to tax corporations beyond the barest minimum. Or whether globalization will make such taxation all but impossible.