Slashdot Mirror
DRAM Price Fixing Investigations
An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago after FTC antitrust charges against Rambus were thrown out, the U.S. Department of Justice and EU have both begun probes against the 4 largest memory makers in accusation of price fixing during 2001/2002. News.com.com has information regarding the pending EU investigation. Anandtech and Silcon.com both have primers on the U.S. investigation. If you thought you paid too much for RAM in 2002, chances are you may have been more right than you originally thought."
myself and my compeptitors agree to keep the price of widgets artificially high.
That is where you cross the line
When you agree with another company to both keep the prices high. This stops one of the companies in the agreement from undercutting the other to achieve more sells, and keeps the profit margins for both in the agreement (artificially) high.
What you choose to do within your own company (razors, cartridges) is entirely up to you...
We have since gone to Dell, which are admittedly more expensive, but they work properly and have good support (though lately G'nesh Singh Bhudanaramading keeps answering the phone when we call- we never know what he is talking about, but when a new network card appears the next day, it usually fixes the problem...)
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
No, because in both cases, the company supplies both the product (razor, printer) and the refill (blades, ink cratridges). There's no collusion, since it's one company doing it to their own product, and therefore not illegal since there's no cartel or monopoly abuse, since there are plenty of razor and printer manufacturers to choose from.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
IANAL, I am an economist who enjoyed industrial organization a bit too much for my own good. It is only when you have meetings or evidence of collusion that you begin breaking the price fixing portions of anti-trust law in such a way as to invite prosecution. As long as your monopoly arises as a result of a competitive market (for handles and printers) you are not violating the law.
The justice department generally tries to avoid procecutions for anti-trust violations, which are very expensive and prefers to regulate the market by barring mergers which would reduce competition. However there was a ton of case law generated on these subjects from the turn of the century through the 1970s when suits were more common.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
If you price your product BELOW COST, you can be accused of predatory pricing. Without this rule, no small manufacturer could ever reasonable compete against an established one. The one with the large market share would simply undercut the competition by selling at a loss and ride on its existing resources until the competition went under. If you set a price higer than a competitor, it is used as evidence of an "abusive monopoly position" Only if coupled with other factors, such as anti-competitive \ exclusive contracts with related parties. Case in point, Microsoft's contracts with computer OEMs preventing them from bundling other OSes on the same computer as Windows. BeOS - overall, a superior product - went under because of precisely this. They had no chance to compete and prove themselves on an open market because of Microsoft's restrictive contracts. (which, in turn, no OEM would break because of Microsoft's ownership of the home market)
If you set the same price as a competitor, it is evidence of "price fixing"
CAN be, but only very rarely. As was pointed out in another post above, price-fixing \ cartel cases are spectacularly difficult to prove and usually require a "smoking gun" as evidence. The government even launching such a case is itself evidence that they have a load of proof on their side. Otherwise, it's assumed to be the result of normal market pressures. (why, for example, all the major computer brands cost about the same - prices have trended downwards since the 80s until it's hit a point that it's extremely difficult to get any cheaper and still profit. That's not price-fixing, it's the Free Market actually working as it's supposed to.)
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Commodity DRAM memory has been around $0.10 / megabyte since 2002. I remember slashdot stories about $100 gigabytes at that time. Until Wintel breaks the 2GB/32-bit limit the core memory cost is not a major factor in personal computing. in contrast, flash memory has fallen from $1.00 to $0.25 that time period.
The price plateaus when a chip generation matures. The next 4x generation seems a bit delayed.
companies are given patents or copyrights for products that involve huge costs to develop. If it wasn't for copyrights, these companies would not make the initial investment because it would be significantly harder to earn back the cost if everyone could just copy your product.