Micron Seeking Amnesty in DoJ Antitrust Probe?

deaddeng writes "Memory maker Micron Technology is allegedly seeking amnesty from a US Dept. of Justice grand jury investigation of price fixing, collusion, and antitrust by the memory industry, according to numerous news services, including the LA Times and Reuters. Last week, a Micron regional marketing employee pled guilty to charges brought under the same DoJ investigation for destruction of evidence and lying to the grand jury. The DoJ is investigating charges that major memory makers colluded to prevent the success of Rambus memory favored by Intel, and once that was achieved, colluded again to raise prices for DDR-SDRAM in 2001-02. If Micron is granted amnesty, it can keep its executives from facing criminal prosecution, but it may still face civil court challenges."

Comments

Rambus is better?

[Anonymous Coward]

And Rambus Inc.'s practices are better?

Re:Rambus is better?

[eschasi]

What are you saying here? That Micron et. al. shouldn't be cited for doing illegal things like market-wide collusion simply because RAMBUS tried to illegally pervert the standards process?

IMHO both RAMBUS and price colluders, if guilty, ought to get it in the neck.

Only Micron?

[Kurt Wall]

Rambus, Inc.'s misbehavior is well-known, so Micron is hardly alone here. If Micron is guilty of collusion, the pregnant question is, "With whom were Micron colluding?"

Libertarialism != Capitalism

[sparklingfruit]

One is a political ideology, the other is an economic philosophy. Unfettered corporate capitalism leads to fascism (the state regulation of the economy) in that the state becomes a tool of the corporations, rather like you see in the USA today. A well-structured capitalist society *requires* government intervention, for the same reasons a well-structured civil society requires government intervention (in the form of the police, and the judicial arm of the government). Even if you ignore the travesty of corporations-as-entities as practiced by the USA today, and concentrate on corporations-as-public-charters (such as the the US had before about 1880 or so), you still need regulation and monitoring. Otherwise, the biggest corporations will carry the most power, and therefore have the ability to "regulate" (in the political and economic sense) the functioning of corporations of lesser power. This is why the US has the Sherman Act, and anti-trust laws. Now, these laws are not followed, as is evidenced by the recent anti-trust ruling against Microsoft, and the refusal by the US government to follow through on any meaningful penalty. But, even criminal law doesn't work against corporations, as seen by the recent inaction of the US government against the Enron corporation, and its executives responsible for those crimes. The "true principals of capitalism" work no better than the true principles of communism. (*NOT* that there has been an implementation of true communism, except on extremely small scales. The most we've ever seen practiced by as large as a country is socialism.)

So, let me get this straight...

[Fortunato_NC]

...and I'll freely admit that I haven't RTFA yet...

but Rambus surreptitiously cuts a deal with Intel to make their patented technology the new industry standard for memory, and when it backfires, the rest of the industry is guilty of collusion against Rambus?

The inmates are running the asylum, kiddos, and it's getting nuttier by the minute!