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Sources Say EU Will Find Intel Anti-Competitive
Anarchduke sends in a Reuters story quoting unnamed sources who say that the European Union has decided to find Intel anti-competitive. The finding should be announced in the coming week. "...the Commission will say Intel paid PC makers to delay or scrap the launch of products containing AMD chips. The Commission will characterize the payments as 'naked restrictions' to competition, the sources said. ... Intel set percentages of its own chips that it wanted PC makers to use, the sources said. For example, NEC Corp was told that 20 percent of its desktop and notebook machines could have AMD chips, the sources said. All Lenovo notebooks had to use Intel chips, as did relevant Dell products. The figure was 95 percent for Hewlett-Packard's business desktops, they said." Previous infractions by Intel include giving illegal rebates to computer makers back in 2007 and paying retailers not to sell AMD-based computer systems.
Intel also had that deal with Skype.
I wonder what else they've been up to?
Are there any plans to punish companies that went along with this? Sure, they could argue they were strong-armed into it by Intel but that's no comfort for AMD and the sales they'll have lost.
...for what the EU executive sees as "naked restrictions" to competition, the sources said.
Pictures of the naked restrictions or it didn't happen.
So the EU fines Intel.
Exactly who is paying the fine?
Uh, people buying Intel products. As such it means people all over the world will chip in their pennies to pay the EU for Intel's violation.
A better solution than taking money, banning their product for a set time. That is how you truly stop this type of anti competitive behavior. Fining them just means anyone buying the product has a new embedded tax. Locking them out gets the shareholders pissed and makes heads roll. Can you imagine the grief caused by having your major new processor line forbidden from sales? Suddenly vendors look elsewhere for product and possibly for future contracts because your past actions have now interfered with their business.
Being a government entity in need of cash I suspect the EU will fine them less than they fined MS.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You mean they shouldn't punnish corporation that harm the free market?
Is it me or is no one even remotely interested in following capitalistic rules?
I mean being for the free market and against socialism and all is not just about exiling the commies and making sure you get the highest bonus you can get away with
You forgot:
4) The company abuses its dominant position.
All the time?
In case you need examples:
Saint-Gobain ( 900m euro)
ThyssenKrupp ( 500m)
Hoffmna-La Roche ( 500m)
Siemens ( 400m)
Pilkington ( 400m)
BASF ( 300m)
Otis ( 300m)
A long time ago, Intel had all sorts of wondrous projects in the works. Open formats and innovative chips that would have made it possible for any OS to work with it. And then Microsoft swooped down and quashed this. Played hardball and pigeon holed Intel. Now, close to twenty years later they're finally being busted for similar practices. Part of me says good for the EU for not putting up with this, part of me is a little sad for the young Intel full of potential that got bullied into the position its in today.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Unless they fine them billions they'll just shrug it off as a business expense.
Even then it's a hollow victory. The people will be the ones paying the fine via increased prices.
No sig today...
You mean EU firms such as Lufthansa, Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Viag Interkom GmbH, Telefonica S.A., KONE GmbH, those kinds of firms?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The problem with going after Microsoft is that there are far too many deeds they need punished for that it'd tie up the courts system for decades to come, and waste a LOT of EU tax payers money on a show trial. There is no "first offense" or "mitigating circumstances" in a lot of what Microsoft have done and continue to do. They are unrepentant in their intentions. It's time to tell them to fuck off in the only terms they will understand. It's easier to just ban Microsoft from the EU altogether as an organized crime syndicate. Make their products and services illegal. Give perhaps a years grace period to allow other businesses in the EU who are reliant on Microsoft time to move their business away from Microsoft.
If you don't want to compete fairly in the EU, you're not welcome in the EU.
From what I remember, the commission can impose fines up to 10% of annual turnover, which for a company like Intel is a funny sum of money.
3) The company is American
See this
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1228499&cid=27904971
and this
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1228499&cid=27904903
for EU companies fined
And get over your 'EU hates US' paranoia
Duh.
Intel have been anti-competitive since end of the nineteens. Once AMD vas viable as alternative, suddenly you couldn't buy AMD supported motherboards anymore, let's not talk about systems. Actually Intel did bad for their distributors, because disallowing to sell AMD it allowed to do it their new competitors - in result new branch of distributors grow up with AMD-only stuff (reselling Intel only when it was really needed).
Intel dealership tactics have been ugly all the time. Even now, OLPC got burned from them few years ago.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Even then it's a hollow victory. The people will be the ones paying the fine via increased prices.
Until now people have been paying Intels bribes and anti-competitive cost on top of the hardware prices.
I'd say the prices will stay the same for Intel and AMD should finally be able to compete.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
3) The company is American
The 'anti-american' card you guys keep playing is getting old.
Was the AT&T breakup anti-American? Was the United States v. Microsoft case anti-American?
There is a selection bias here. If a Belgian supermarket chain or a Dutch bank gets slapped by the EU anti-trust commissioner, it doesn't make the headlines on Slashdot, so you will never hear about it.
Fact is, Slashdot reports mainly on technology related things that might interest American readers. The technology monopolies and near-monopolies in the last few decades have mostly been American, so if one abuses its monopoly, it's likely to be an American based company.
The European market is actually a patchwork of independently grown and recently connected markets. Some companies you have never heard of have local (near) monopolies, and face severe anti trust restrictions in those markets. None of this would be news that belongs on Slashdot.
1. Start up a retail store
2. Get varrious large organisations to pay you to not sell stuff.
3. Profit!
. Intel could pay you to not sell AMD products.
. Microsoft could pay you to not sell your products with Linux on them.
. Jack Thompson could pay you to not sell your products with violent or sexually explicit software on them
. Pepsi could pay you to not sell Coke
. McDonalds could pay you to not have a Hungry Jacks (Burger King) store in your food court
I'm sure there's money to be made here!
Normally I would agree with you there, but I'm in a slightly less cynical mood today so I'll offer a more toned down view...
Standard operating practice is to use your dominant position as much as possible without abusing it to the detriment of the overall market. This from what I can tell is what Oracle (to pick one of the above examples) does - if they were unfairly treating companies who ever recommended/use other databases I'm sure wed know as Microsoft would be very quick to head to the courtroom about it and open source groups would be up in arms too.
Going above and beyond using your position, i.e. abusing it to the detriment to others, should not be seen as encouraged by the markets any more than someone accidentally dropping their wallet should be seen as encouragement to take the cash found there-in before handing it to "lost property". It is abuse of the monopoly that the EU is going after, not just use. MS were suspected of abusing their monopoly so were investigated and called to order (with little effect it would seem, but that is a whole different discussion), now so have Intel.
Of course the above depends greatly on the definition of the very fine (and arguable) line between use and abuse... Intel's behaviour in this case is definitely abuse, I dont' see how else it could be interpreted, but in other cases things are not so clear cut. Are some of Google's plans an abuse of their position or just use of it? What about some behaviour of (to be more general) the large chain supermarkets?
One final complication is that some monopolies, often those that stemmed from a company having spun off from a previously government owned project, being forced to *help* the competition or at least provide services to them at no cost greater then they would cross-share themselves in their internal economy. BT in the UK having to provide access to exchanges for other companies to install equipment, where possible, being one example. I don't see how this would be possible with Intel, but you can see the reasoning in some of the edicts given to Microsoft by the EU about making the installation of alternative browsers easy and obvious to the user.
Ireland - GP visit: 60, prescription drugs - cutoff is 130 per month, per household, Accident and Emergency visit - 90 unless referred by a GP, public hospital outpatient visits - 90 charge. Waiting lists for public outpatient procedures can be the better part of a year (private patients are treated in public hospitals and get priority).
Some of us haven't experienced enough EU influence.
People earning 30,000 or even more might be paying no income tax, and yet are "poor" due to having to pay through the nose directly for everything.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
I agree with you that this does not have an "anti-American" motivation and I'm generally pretty sensitive to that sort of thing. To my mind it's that the EU has a different view of how monopolies should be regulated than the U.S. government does - at this time. I actually agree more with the EU position in the cases of Microsoft and Intel. (I do think the EU tends toward over-regulation instead of letting the markets work while the U.S. seems to be too laissez faire.)
I'm pro-capitalism and pro-market, but here in the U.S. we seem to have forgotten that the objectives of government economic policy should not be the perfect "efficiency" of markets. It should be the well being of it's population over the short, medium and long terms. Capitalism and free markets are a means to this end. They are not the end itself. Neither were mandated by God or advocated by any of the major prophets so why do some people act as if they were?
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
You get a 1.5 out of 3. The first item is likely true, in part because smaller cases are probably either handled at the national level (do not need to involve the EU) or perhaps such cases exist but do not get the same media coverage. But OK, I'll give you that one.
As to item 3: the EU also regularly heavily fines large European companies. For example, Siemens got fined for 400 million euro for forming a price cartel. Also see here: "The total fines slapped on 11 companies based in the EU and Japan amount to some 750.7 million euros. [..] The total penalty for the cartel is the second-highest imposed by the commission [as of 2007], following a record 790.5 million euros for fixing vitamin prices in 2001".
Oh, and before you ask, that vitamin cartel involved Hoffman-La Roche of Switzerland, which got fined 462m euros, and BASF of Germany, which got fined to the tune of 296m.
As to 2: the company doesn't have to be a monopoly either, although such fines do indeed commonly concern oligopolies (since forming cartels is a very lucrative prospect in such an environment, for obvious reasons). See above examples. Because of such cartels you could perhaps call this "essentially a monopoly", so ok, half point there.
I'd have assumed you where just trolling, but since you are getting upmodded and I've seen such sentiments in other discussions as well, I thought I'd point this out.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
...not just about... making sure you get the highest bonus you can get away with
Communist! Get him!
And the free market works even here. Here in Belgium you can choose between the Christelijke Mutualiteit, Bond Moyson and the neutral health care insurance.
This offers two benefits: the first is that Intel gets hit in the wallet where they need to be for their actions. The second is that AMD recovers some of the money lost due to Intel's actions, thus encouraging actual competition by allowing AMD to survive. As a side benefit of this action, ATI would also survive, thus ensuring that Nvidia has effective competition in the graphics card market,
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
NY Times "WASHINGTON â" President Obamaâ(TM)s top antitrust official this week plans to restore an aggressive enforcement policy against corporations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or to keep them from gaining market share."
"The new enforcement policy would reverse the Bush administrationâ(TM)s approach, which strongly favored defendants against antitrust claims. It would restore a policy that led to the landmark antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft and Intel in the 1990s."
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
A good example of a case covering both points you make was the BA/Virgin price-fixing case, handled by the Office of Fair Trading here in the UK instead of by the EU. It wasn't monopoly that caused the problem, but oligopolist price fixing.
The US DoJ got a look in on that one for obvious reasons.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
In a truly free market a monopoly is unlikely. The semiconductor market is not a free market at all, but one based around artificial monopolies (patents and copyrights). In this case adding regulation actually makes it freer.
Of all the reasons to speak against universal healthcare, "theft of property and labor" based on your value judgment of another life is not one of them.
Let's do a foot race analogy!
Two racers competing. Ideally, the faster runner should win. But one competitor isn't quite sure that he will win or that the margin will be big enough. So instead of focusing on being the best runner he can possibly be, he sets about bribing judges, paying shoe sellers not to sell the best shoes to the other runner, and making deals with sponsors not to sponsor the other runner.
This is about fair competition and calling people out for using dirty and ILLEGAL tricks to suppress the competition. In the U.S., big companies have largely purchased most of the government and get away with things they shouldn't. In the E.U., a relatively fresh government body, has not yet been bought out by large companies and are more free to enforce laws in which big businesses are in violation. This may eventually change as time goes on. I suspect the change will come through pressure by the U.S. government, on behalf of U.S. industries.
Wouldn't it be nice if the E.U. could somehow gain leverage and apply pressure on the U.S. government to reform?
First, your arithmetic is atrocious. Work on that. Second, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "the Microsoft fine", seeing how Microsoft has been fined several times, since unlike those European companies, it just doesn't want to learn. Third, none of the companies I listed were stupid enough to try to string the commission along. But then, with profit margins reaching 81%(par. 464), perhaps it's not really a matter of "stupidity", ey.
You mean they shouldn't punnish corporation that harm the free market?
I think you might have an odd definition of "free market". IANAE, but it seems to me that a business protecting its interests against competition is a fundamental part of the free market concept.
You're the one with the odd definitions. If I protect my interests by hiring mercenaries to shoot anyone who goes into my competitor's business that's the free market since I'm just protecting my interests against competitors?!?
As soon as the government starts interfering, it's no longer a true "free market"
Umm, without government protections, there is no free market, just anarchy, which is decidedly unfree for everyone who doesn't have the most firepower.
It appears that not everyone agrees with this: ...
4. Tendency for industry competition to evolve into monopolies and oligopolies
Martin J. Whitman
it's important to remember that "monopoly" when used here doesn't mean 100% of the market, but (like MS) enough of the market that it might as well be 100%, or at least large enough that they can exercise anti-competitive behavior. Some might suggest that Walmart is already influencing the market: I don't know if they're actually anti-competitive, and there are certainly other retailers, but let's face it, they have no artificial monopoly protections such as patents and yet they are still dominating the market. Unchecked (and if nothing else changes) they could easily grow to encompass the majority of the retail market... personally I happen to agree with Mr. Whitman: there needs to be some regulation on business to ensure that there continues to be competition. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, and it's certainly not what Big Business wants people to believe
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
The "free" in "free market" refers to freedom of entry and exit. It in no way underwrites the archaic understanding you are pushing. It used to be believed, back before large conglomerate monopolies, that the free market governed itself. Then monopolies happened, either state manufactured via patents, or through what you describe. Nations wishing a free market economy then realized that the "free" had to be enforced via regulations and those regulations needed teeth to punish the Business School Product who connived, cheated, and stole violating the "free".
Antitrust regulation was drawn up and enforced. Then a strange thing happened, people like you never read up on what makes a free market and the "free" stopped being as protected as it needed to be. The consequence is companies that feel they can do anything they like to restrict "free" causing those of us who do read heartburn.
You're kinda missing the point of the free market. You're thinking of wild west I can gun any man down sort of freedom. The free market is free as in freely competed within. Which is why the US and EU and many other governments have groups that are supposed to maintain exactly that, the ability for anyone to enter and compete within the market based on their goods. Not on their ability to pay people to use them.
Free markets aren't the natural progression of capitalism but something that has to be enforced.
it's important to remember that "monopoly" when used here doesn't mean 100% of the market, but (like MS) enough of the market that it might as well be 100%, or at least large enough that they can exercise anti-competitive behavior.
One of the clichés in economics texts is the "5-50" rule of thumb saying that a "market" acts like a monopoly if 5 or fewer companies get 50% or more of the sales.
Of course, like any rule of thumb, this is basically "economics for dummies", because the reality is that there's a continuum of actual behaviors. Some big companies are run by people with ethics and a long-term view (though they tend to disappear with time). Some markets have sufficient delivery problems that they act like local monopolies even with a hundred companies.
But the point of such things is to debunk the traditional even sillier idea that you only have a "monopoly" if there is just one company. This is called the Etymological Fallacy, the idea that the meaning of a word is defined by the meanings of its parts in the original (long-dead) languages. It's popular with the people who like the idea of unbridled, lassez-faire capitalism. But that's not how economists or most other people use the term in English. In the real world, there are such things as "gentlemen's agreements" that produce monopoly markets even when there are several sellers.
It's fairly clear to nearly everyone that the US retail computer business is a monopoly market, although there are two companies supplying the core hardware and two companies providing the OSs. A small fraction of the population can actually name the second software supplier (though very few can name either hardware supplier). But it's been that way here for a few decades now, so we don't expect that we'll see an actual free market in computer retailing in our lifetime. It's interesting reading about efforts in other parts of the world to do something about the monopoly. It'll be even more interesting if they actually succeed, and make it possible for smaller startups to actually do business.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Use €
Do you think maybe just maybe that the reason AMD is trailing is because Intel has been pulling this shit for so long that AMD had less capital to reinvest back into R&D?
Read "Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith. You are referring the later capitalists which re-interpreted free market to require "hands off" by the government. What that meant was that the government should not help to create monopolies or distort the market. It has nothing to do with keeping the playing field level.