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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.
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
Nice idea, but imagine the grief of having a major processor line forbidden from sales in general. AMD couldn't pick up all that slack, and other CPU companies are hardly in a position to replace Intel.
Result? A vacuum of components. Not good for the industry in general.
You forgot:
4) The company abuses its dominant position.
A better solution than taking money, banning their product for a set time.
No, that would be punishing EU member states at least as much Intel. Have you looked at the market for servers lately? Desktops? Laptops? Intel is subject to anti-competition laws because it has a dominant market position. If you were to suddenly cut their products out of the market, that would hurt every manufacturer of IT equipment and every business that uses said equipment. That is a great way to hurt the EU's ability to perform in the world market.
The reason a fine is useful is precisely because the costs are passed on to Intel customers worldwide, not just in the EU. This means that it really is Intel that is paying for its behavior on a global scale.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Exactly who is paying the fine?
Uh, people buying Intel products.
They could buy AMD products, instead, which is more or less the point.
In case you need examples:
Saint-Gobain ( 900m euro)
ThyssenKrupp ( 500m)
Hoffmna-La Roche ( 500m)
Siemens ( 400m)
Pilkington ( 400m)
BASF ( 300m)
Otis ( 300m)
European Union has slightly bigger purchasing power than United States ($14.82 trillion to $14.29 trillion, accoarding to CIA Factbook). It is probably the biggest market Intel has, as China buys cheaper processors and Japan is just smaller.
If it would stop operating in Europe, the local manufacturers would just buy the chips from USA while AMD cranks up its production to meet the demands for a whole continent which despises its competitor.
Please think before you write.
Chronologically late.
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.
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.
I'd like to add to parent by mentioning that by passing the costs to their customers, the Union is making the products of AMD more competitive in comparison to Intel. To avoid that, Intel must suck it up and pay the fine from The Bad Day-fund.
Chronologically late.
Another alternative would be to force the companies named to use a minimum 50% AMD chips averaged over the next five years.
Extra costs for them, loss of market share for Intel. Seems to me like justice is done all round (I consider the companies almost as guilty as Intel for their complicity).
Yes the price of computers would undergo a hiccup as they retool for different chips but that's not _really_ any different then Intel being fined billions of dollars.
No sig today...
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
>>>part of me is a little sad for the young Intel full of potential that got bullied [by Microsoft] into the position its in today.
Young Intel? Bullied? Funny.
Intel was the most-powerful computer company in the late-1980s and throughout the 1990s. Microsoft was just one of dozens of software companies and had no real power until it released Windows 95 and squashed the competition (Os/2, GEOS, DR-DOS). You mis-characterize the situation when you call Intel a puppet of MS. Intel was the goliath of the industry, having ridden the IBM PC platform to 95% dominance.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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 must have missed, that intel already was well-known for doing that, ten years ago, when AMD wanted to get mainboard manufacturers to make some boards for the then new Athlon CPU. I remember this, because I bought an Athlon 850 back ten. And there were only 4 companies on the planet who offered a board. And way too late too. Which was because of intel's practices.
I also remember, that it was before 2001, because I moved at the end of 2000 and then already had my new computer.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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'
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?
Hi, I'm Cyrus and I'd like some money too. Yeah, me too, make the check out to VIA. Hey, DEC here, don't forget me! Yo, dudes, it's Joe Blow; I had a great idea for a chip but I couldn't get VC funding because Intel was in such a dominant position; where's mine?
For a real world example of why this is a bad idea see any music industry initiative to levy recordable media.