Intel Receives Record Fine By the EU

Firefalcon writes "Intel has been fined a record 1.06 billion euros ($1.45 billion / £948 million) by the European Competition Commission after being found guilty of anti-competitive practices. This makes Microsoft's 497 million euro fine in 2004 (which was a record at the time) seem like a slap on the hand. Reports had previously suggested that the fine would be similar to Microsoft's. Intel was charged (among other things) with encouraging manufacturers and retailers to purchase fewer (or even not stock) AMD processors. More details of the ruling are on the European Commission's Competition website. Intel said they will appeal the fine."

Comments

But where does all that money go?

[mc1138]

Without knowing exactly where it goes I can only speculate, but could this fine by so high to help fix European budgets stretched too thin by a weak economy?

Re:But where does all that money go?

[nicolas.kassis]

Possibly, but here that would be a drop in the ocean. I wonder if the DOJ will do the same.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[rbarreira]

Yeah I'm sure the 2 for each EU resident will save the whole continent

Re:But where does all that money go?

[MemoryDragon]

Without knowing exactly where it goes I can only speculate, but could this fine by so high to help fix European budgets stretched too thin by a weak economy?

No, it would not even be enough to fix the buget of a single EU country, but high enough that intel basically feels a smack on the hand,

besides that the entire thing now goes into revision several times and by the time everything is settled the economy crisis is over.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[clickclickdrone]

>help fix European budgets
Hardly. 1Bn is a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of billions being spent across Europe (and elsewhere) shoring up the economies.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Ihlosi]

Without knowing exactly where it goes I can only speculate, but could this fine by so high to help fix European budgets stretched too thin by a weak economy?

No. The fine is a minor annoyance for Intel, and it's a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket compared to the budget holes of most European countries.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[biocute]

Depends when Intel has to pay for it.

In 2020, this "Record Fine" is probably worth 2 CPUs.

Which is why all these records are meaningless.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[mc1138]

Well I'm sure it won't get passed on to normal citizens, more likely will help pad budgets for government programs that may or may not help citizens.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the accompanying memo:

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/09/235&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

Where does the money go?

Once final judgment has been delivered in any appeals before the Court of First Instance (CFI) and the Court of Justice, the money goes into the EUs central budget, thus reducing the contributions that Member States pay to the EU.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[jonbryce]

Britain alone needs around £3 trillion to sort out its banking system. This is just loose change.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[evohe80]

According to the NYTimes article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/business/global/14compete.html, the fine has to be paid right away. The money is placed in a bank account until further appeals are resolved.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[commodore64_love]

"Every penny counts in balancing the budget." - Obama. No matter. Intel's not going to pay this 1500 million dollar fine. They'll just hire more lawyers and keep dragging it out for several years, and only end-up paying a few million.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[FictionPimp]

Doing business with the EU is just too risky. If I was intel I'd pay my fine and get out.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Ihlosi]

Doing business with the EU is just too risky.

Risky? Courts in the EU are a lot saner than their US counterparts. Don't want to get slapped with antitrust fines? Obey the law. Really. It's not hard. Sell a better product at a lower price, for example.

If I was intel I'd pay my fine and get out.

Good thing you're not Intel. Or running Intel. You would have tried to fix one bad business decision (shady anticompetitive deals) with another really bad business decision (abandoning a significant portion of your market).

Re:But where does all that money go?

[click2005]

The EU combined is a bigger market than the US.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[DarrenBaker]

Somebody below mentioned that according to the laws of the EU, Intel will have to pay now, and appeal later. Can anyone ascribe some truthiness to this?

Re:But where does all that money go?

[erroneus]

I would agree with you if this were a U.S. case under the Bush DoJ. But this is the E.U. and those tactics did not work for Microsoft. Your presumption is demonstrably unlikely.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[FictionPimp]

I fail at making jokes apparently :-(

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely... I'm always amazed to see americans say the same each time there is some EU fine to a US company: "they should just leave EU."

Well, as weird as it may sound, the EU GDP is higher than the US GDP. Many countries there have a higher GDP per capita than the US, too.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[FictionPimp]

I was trying to make a joke. I guess I failed.

If i was running intel, I'd keep doing what they are doing.

The difference. I would only sell my cpu's out of a country with no laws preventing that behavior.

I mean pc manufactures can order then from that country and ship them from that country to anywhere they want (I would not export from my country).

When you are as big as intel you could get away with it. Especially if you were bribing companies like HP and Dell to go along with it.

Then the US and EU can't touch you because you are not doing buisness in their country. Instead Dell is just buying your products and importing them.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[frieko]

I would call it more than a minor annoyance. Their 2008 profit was €3.9 billion, this is 27% of that.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[SSCGWLB]

"Every penny counts in balancing the budget." - Obama. No matter. Intel's not going to pay this 1500 million dollar fine. They'll just hire more lawyers and keep dragging it out for several years, and only end-up paying a few million.

I really don't think Obama cares about pennies or balancing the budget. His budget has the largest deficit since 1945. Yay for national debt!

Re:But where does all that money go?

[CCW]

Clearly Intel and their shareholders should be happy you don't run Intel.

Your losing strategy would still be abandoning the entire European market to AMD, giving them much more sales and revenue and profit.

Why? Because countries can control their borders. Nobody in the EU could buy your cpu's because they couldn't IMPORT them until you paid the fine,and/or they'd be slapped with an import duty which would apply to the fine. Your expensive EU fab would sit idle. Your shareholders would fire you for complete incompetence and you'd never work in the industry again (I'm just making up the last bit, incompetent executives never get fired and blackballed - they get hired to run some other company by even stupider management. Check out HomeDepot and Chrysler and see how it works)

Still, the basic truth is that governments can be influenced by companies, but companies cannot "fight" governments. They will lose.

What Intel will really do is delay through the legal process as long as possible, influence the governments as much as possible, and ultimately probably pay a somewhat reduced fine some years in the future.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[neongrau]

even US antitrust experts say that intel deserves that fine.

the law says they can be fined for 10% of their turnover which was 37+ billion euros.

so intel can consider themselves lucky for not having to pay 3.7B euros or about 5B USD(!!!).

but depending on intels reaction the whole case could be brought up again (since more and more "witnesses" or "intel business partners" are speaking up now) possibly ending in the 5B fine.

best move for intel will be to swallow the fine and keep a low profile in the future. or it will turn out even more expensive.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[FictionPimp]

On the up side, The EU would lose all those fab jobs, and AMD would be unable to meet the demand and raise their prices. Making my product become all the more attractive.

Oh and I would still pay the fine, I would just do those other things as well. You are right you don't fight the government, you give them what they want. They don't like your business practices, so you don't practice business in their countries.

Do you think AMD could ramp up production fast enough to keep PC prices from going though the roof if Intel just said fuck it?

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Machtyn]

If it isn't clear* putting a star with a footnote is useful.

* my jokes/sarcasm aren't always clear in text, either.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Chris Burke]

Somebody below mentioned that according to the laws of the EU, Intel will have to pay now, and appeal later. Can anyone ascribe some truthiness to this?

It has a Truthiness factor of 7.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[DarrenBaker]

Hrmm... Interesting, interesting. I like it.

And as for veracity?

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Bob Wehadababyitsabo]

They must put the funds in escrow until they have settled their final appeals. The float on $1.5 billion is significant, so they are out something regardless of their final verdict. "The company must write a bank guarantee for the fine right away, though that guarantee is held in a bank account until appeals are exhausted, a process that could take years." ref

Re:But where does all that money go?

[houghi]

Sucks to be you. Even this remark got a +5 insightful instead of a funny.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn European Socialists.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[sexconker]

"Every penny counts in balancing the budget."

But passing out a few trillion here or there to crooks and morons is good for us. Trust me.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Fumus]

Next time use the snark sign: ~

Re:But where does all that money go?

[The J Kid]

Only a 2 I'm affraid.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[DarrenBaker]

Ah, but that's a '2' on the old OOS (Old OOS Scale) scale. In modern terms, that's a 7 as well. Excellent. Gentlemen, we have a consensus factor of 54, with an implied hearsay vector calculated at 1, leaving us free to continue speculating.

I just want to say, "good work, gentlemen". We've cracked it!

Re:But where does all that money go?

[MrNemesis]

Proof of the Wintel synergy - now we know the real reason behind the Pentium FP bug and the Excel 2007 calculation bugs was merely to exploit scenarios exactly like this!

if [$filename == 'Intel Antitrust Fine Calculations.xlsx']; then
$fine_total = $fine_total/10
fi

The more imaginative of you will also be curious to find out that Excel is also written in BASH... but that's another story.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Anonymous Coward]

And by the time the appeal process is over they will have probably made it back 50 times over.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[EvilBudMan]

This is a good question. It shouldn't be modded as flamebait either. It is true that the EU has levied fines against companies in the EU but the big fines are against US companies. We'll AMD complained. Shouldn't they get a portion along with the other chip manufactures that this affects if there are any others.

So while the EU might be right to fine them the money should go to the other companies hurt. I didn't see Netscape getting anything from Microsoft? So while Siemens gets fined a much smaller amount for the same practices while being just as large of a company.

So, no it will not help prop up their economy that way, but if they hurt US companies then EU companies will benefit.

So now the US is no longer dictating world economic policy but the EU is. Most /.r's seem to be happy about this. That they will do a better job. I wonder really about the long term here.

I think a better solution would have been to say to Intel "Hey you can't have these practices here in the EU if you want to do business here." but they are also telling Intel what they can and can't do outside their borders. Maybe the DOJ does the same thing, but that's the only issue I have with it.

Microsoft can still bundle Media Player here but not in the EU I think?

Re:But where does all that money go?

[TheRecklessWanderer]

lol if I was intel I wouldn't pay the fine and get out. I'd also pull out manufacturing.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[spun]

AMD surely could ramp up production fast enough. Thankfully, no corporation can push around national governments, unless those governments let them. Not doing business is not an option. Legal tricks to do business with a country, and not fall under that country's laws, will not work.

You seem to be gloating over Intel's imaginary ability to screw with the EU and control markets. Do you relish the idea of national governments being powerless to control corporations?

Re:But where does all that money go?

[textstring]

Without knowing exactly where it goes I can only speculate, but could this fine by so high to help fix European budgets stretched too thin by a weak economy?

I strongly believe that it should go to the AMD shareholder.
Disclaimer: I currently hold shares in AMD.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[solios]

Risky? Courts in the EU are a lot saner than their US counterparts. Don't want to get slapped with antitrust fines? Obey the law. Really. It's not hard. Sell a better product at a lower price, for example.

Have you seen American business practices lately? That is risky - especially when the .eu won't be granting you billions in cash when the bottom falls out of your broke-ass business plan.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[hguorbray]

...they are also telling Intel what they can and can't do outside their borders. Maybe the DOJ does the same thing, but that's the only issue I have with it.

Well, the US does forbid US firms to engage in bribery in other countries (even if is SOP in those places)

Sun was just reported as admitting they may be in trouble over this.

Of course, the next question might be -why isn't the US also going after Intel for bribery in the EU? -unless that would constitute double jeapordy or something....but the US has a pretty miserable record of prosecuting market abusers these days...

-I'm just sayin'

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Ash Vince]

The majority of it get paid out to farmers subsidies. The US does something very similar.

If we did not pay our farmers vast sums of money then they could not hope to compete with farmers from areas like the third world where the cost of living is much lower. They would then be driven out of business in the same way that globalisation has decimated manufacturing in most developed societies.

The difference is that in the case of manufacturing we can at least modernise and try and costs down that way. With agriculture that is much harder as many crops are just too labour intensive even with modern machinery.

By the way, I am from the UK. If this fine means I have to contribute one penny less next year in taxes to Europe then I am all for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_the_European_Union

Re:But where does all that money go?

[FictionPimp]

I think you are simply naive. Bailouts, media and tech companies buying judges and politicians to pass laws that are in the total WORST interest of innovation, oil companies starting wars.

Do you really think the government can't be pushed around by big business? I just think that intel needs to learn how to play the game. Same with microsoft.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[spun]

Again, I have to ask: can businesses push around every single government on the planet, and is that a good thing?

The thing is, corporations can't vote, and they can't control the vote of their owners, employees, and customers. They can donate money, but so can competitors.

Monopoly abuses of power stifle innovation and destroy free markets.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[mgblst]

This is not important. It is important that it is high enough to make Intel change their ways, and that it is high enough that they made a loss on using these illegal techniques. I don't think it is either. (of course, the threat of continued fines might help).

Re:But where does all that money go?

[mgblst]

What about an EU divided??

(Not sure why it is necessary to say EU combined? How does it compare to just the EU, or US combined?)

Re:But where does all that money go?

[drsquare]

It is true that the EU has levied fines against companies in the EU but the big fines are against US companies.

You do realise that the previous record was €896 million against a French company? Obviously the EU is anti-EU as well as anti-US.

There are a lot of tears in this thread, and the previous article, from Americans upset that one of their precious corporations has actually been punished for its transgressions.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[NOLFXceptMe]

It _is_ very true. In the EU, you have to cough up the fine first, appeal later. This was exactly what happened when MS did not pay up the 497 Euro fine, dragged the case on, and got fined again and again.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Ihlosi]

I would call it more than a minor annoyance. Their 2008 profit was 3.9 billion, this is 27% of that.

So, roughly a quarter of a years worth of profit? And that's for several years worth of unlawful practices that gave the company a huge advantage (->profit)? That's definitely a minor annoyance.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Ihlosi]

There are a lot of tears in this thread, and the previous article, from Americans upset that one of their precious corporations has actually been punished for its transgressions.

And oddly enough, none of this punishment would have happened if it hadn't been for another American company complaining for years to the antitrust authorities.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[EvilBudMan]

Not exactly my point. The point I was trying to make was, "is it really going to help AMD?". I'm not upset at all if that IS the reason.

Will it change their market share? Probably not. The EU should give a portion of their fines to the companies that were affected. How you do that, I don't since many are driven out of business by the time a judgment get's handed down from the EU.

In the US it's worse, we just don't enforce the DOJ judgments. That changes with the administration.

As of now that is just a slap on the wrist for someone that has got rid of SPARC, Power PC, and others pretty much.

BTW, what was that French company?

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Hognoxious]

If you've got time in between driving your Hummer to McKentuckyBurgerBell and burning science textbooks why don't you do the math?

I figure it'd maybe buy everyone in the EU a beer.

Re:But where does all that money go?

[Xest]

No, because it's so small it wouldn't have the slightest effect.

To put it into perspective, it's less than £1bn and the bank of England has just pumped £125bn into the British economy in quantitive easing, we're also around £150 - £200bn in debt for the next year or two.

Now multiply that across all the other countries in Europe and you'll realise that this fine would have no effect on improving European economies.

I'm not entirely sure what you meant by weak economy either, whether you're referring to any specific country or the EU as a whole, if it's the latter it's worth pointing out the EU is the largest economy in the world, beating out even the US by a decent amount. The euro has done well too in the current economic situation which has also helped many European economies come out okay. Even if one European countries economy is weak, the EU as a whole has the power to make sure things do well - this is why Iceland, whose economy pretty much collapsed in the current recession is now desperately trying to get in the EU because it can help them.

Realistically, this fine is in the millions, the hundreds of millions but in the millions, whilst the US and Europe are talking in the trillions to fix their economies.

Intel Appealing?

[Firefalcon]

I can't see the appeal doing much except perhaps reducing the fine somewhat...

Re:Intel Appealing?

[v1]

wow, never saw that coming

Re:Intel Appealing?

[moon3]

With $1.45 billion on the table.

Any law firm would go nuts to have a piece of that action. Even to reduce the fine by 1%, that is still well over million dollars..

Re:Intel Appealing?

[Sponge Bath]

Now witness the final battle between Captain Obvious and the Mighty Sarcasmo!

Re:Intel Appealing?

[stjobe]

Well played, Sir, well played indeed.

Now do you have any suggestions for drying coffee out of a keyboard?

Re:Intel Appealing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I humbly suggest using some of the hot air blowing from a certain EU courtoom...

Re:Intel Appealing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now do you have any suggestions for drying coffee out of a keyboard?

And Commander Cliche checks in.

Re:Intel Appealing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying a new keyboard

Re:Intel Appealing?

[Anonymous Coward]

What hot air would that be? An EU courtroom is not the same as a US courtroom. They're quite different.

Re:Intel Appealing?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean other than putting it in the dishwasher?

Re:Intel Appealing?

[Spykk]

In soviet Russia, Commisar Meme enters the fray.

How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Pvt_Ryan]

Step 1: Find a large wealthy company.
Step 2: Fine them for anti-competitive behaviour.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[MemoryDragon]

Sorry to shatter your worldview here, 1 and 2 are not related. The fine is not even close to help out of any recession...

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[InsurrctionConsltant]

I know it's a joke, and mod me down for being a poopsack, but it's important to be clear that what Intel's been fined for is some nasty shit, and there's little question they're guilty. LA Times has a good write up:

"The Commission finds that Intel did not compete fairly, frustrating innovation and reducing consumer welfare in the process," Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Competition Policy, said at a Brussels news conference announcing the fine. "Given that Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for over five years, the size of the fine should come as no surprise."

The violations took place between 2002 and 2007, when Intel controlled at least 70% of the world market for microprocessors, Kroes said.

"Intel awarded major computer manufacturers rebates on condition that they purchased all or almost all of their supplies, at least in certain defined segments, from Intel," the Commission concluded.

...

The Europeans began their investigation in July 2007, and their findings should help U.S. regulators, said David Balto, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former antitrust official at the FTC and the Department of Justice. He noted that Intel also has been found in violation of antitrust laws by Japan and Korea.

"The relief that the Europeans imposed I think will provide an excellent guide to U.S. enforcers as they try to determine what to do about Intel's exclusionary conduct," Balto said today.

...

"Their website invites visitors to add their 'vision of tomorrow,' " [Kroes] said. "Well, I can give my vision of tomorrow for Intel here and now: "Obey the law"."

Link.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[xenolion]

I think your wanting to say "how to be a politician." also you would need to add: Step 3: Claim this will help the consumers (when in reality Intel will just add 2% onto their chip prices to cover the fines like any company does when fined)

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[elrous0]

Who says the EU plans to stop with just Intel? I suspect they'll be hitting a lot more non-European companies with these fines if the recession continues (European companies will get a free pass, of course).

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Ihlosi]

Who says the EU plans to stop with just Intel? I suspect they'll be hitting a lot more non-European companies with these fines if the recession continues (European companies will get a free pass, of course).

As they've slapped plenty of EU companies with fines for anticompetitive behavior, your accusations are fairly unfounded.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[elrous0]

"The Commission finds that Intel did not compete fairly"

Not to be too harsh about it, but has ANY company ever really "competed fairly"? It seems to me that if you're playing fair, you're usually not really competing (not in the top tier anyway). Sure, there are great companies like Canonical who are playing fairly in the OS market, for example, but are they really "competing" when the much more cutthroat Apple and MS consistently control 99% of the OS market and shut them out of every mainstream retailer? Sad as it is to say, you almost HAVE to play dirty to "compete" in any real sense. I certainly bet a lot of clean professional athletes must have felt that way when they saw guys like McGwire, Bonds, etc. knocking them out of the park while they struggled.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[TheP4st]

A bit like how the US invaded a Iraq (on false pretenses) causing billions of dollars worth of damage. Brought in US giant companies to rebuild the country and then starting whining about how the rest of the world should contribute to the reconstruction?
Could also be explained something like this...
1. Burn down your neighbours house.
2. Contract your Brother to rebuild it.
3. Get kickback from your brother.
4. Profit!!!

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[commodore64_love]

>>>Intel will just add 2% onto their chip prices to cover the fines

Then buy the cheaper IBM, Motorola, or AMD chips instead.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[TheP4st]

Gah!!!, should have been Iraq, not "a Iraq".

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[jonbryce]

And AMD won't be adding 2% onto their prices, so they will be at an advantage.

Actually, I don't think Intel will add it onto their chip prices. If they can get away with charging an extra 2%, they would have done it regardless of any fines they have to pay. As they now face a more competitive AMD, they will likely have to drop prices.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[iamhigh]

Did I hear a WHOOOSH?!?!?

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's the problem. Companies with shareholders are required by law to compete as hard as they can. They are also required not to engage in unlawful anticompetitive behavior. Unfortunately, the line between lawful and unlawful competition isn't precise, and ultimately depends on the judgement of a court. In practice, lawful competition is as much as you can get away with. As much as we enjoy abusing Microsoft and now Intel, they are in a hard position (not that I wouldn't mind having their problems).

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Anonymous Coward]

I must agree, this seems like EU is not even in the business entirely, but they can sure make some money out of it! I would love it if Intel said "No! We won't pay, and we're withdrawing from Europe - No more Intel chips in EU" But they won't, they'll knuckle under. They also do.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[elrous0]

I wouldn't mind their money, but I also like that I can sleep at night with a clear conscience. I'm just not cutthroat enough to be a CEO of one of these companies myself. Maybe I'm a sap, but I would probably be one of the clean athletes getting pwned by Bonds, but at least knowing that MY record was real (and would never have an asterisk after it).

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[garett_spencley]

That's some really vague stuff.

"The Commission finds that Intel did not compete fairly, frustrating innovation and reducing consumer welfare in the process," Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Competition Policy, said at a Brussels news conference announcing the fine. "Given that Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for over five years, the size of the fine should come as no surprise."

They harmed millions of European consumers ? By what measure ? To what extent ? How do you prove that a company actually kept competition out of their industry if they didn't resort to physical coercion or infringed on human rights in any way ? The wording of that paragraph gives me a really uneasy feeling. "Prove that the reason competition did not exist is because of Intel's actions" is asking to prove a negative. It's typical political speak.

"The violations took place between 2002 and 2007, when Intel controlled at least 70% of the world market for microprocessors, Kroes said."

They had a 70% market share so clearly they were doing something wrong ? It couldn't be because 70% of the consumers were satisfied by their products and wanted to buy more ?

"Intel awarded major computer manufacturers rebates on condition that they purchased all or almost all of their supplies, at least in certain defined segments, from Intel," the Commission concluded."

OK now we're getting somewhere. But why is this wrong ? It seems to me that if a significant portion of the market is demanding Intel products then retailers looked at that deal as being worth it. The retailers could make more money if they only sold Intel's products, which could potentially be at the retailer's loss if they had enough consumers wanting alternative products and going elsewhere to get them.

I just don't see how consumer's are being "harmed". Intel was prepared to sell their stuff cheaper in exchange for the retailer only selling their stuff. The only way the retailer can win in this situation is if they're only moving a significant share of Intel products to begin with.

If 50% of the retailer's clientele wanted AMD products then conceivably those 50% would go somewhere else if the store were only selling Intel products. The store would have to make up that 50% loss by an equivalent 50% increase in their profit margin on Intel products.

OR the store could lower it's prices in order to compete with other stores that move both Intel and AMD products (and thus don't get the rebate). The other stores would probably take the rebate to remain competitive. So what happens now ? Consumers are getting cheaper Intel products for one! Secondly AMD would not sit idly by and go out of business. They would start offering rebates of their own for stores that only sell AMD products (ie: they would have to lower their prices). The result would be cheaper processors for everyone! And they say consumers are being harmed!?

OR we could imagine that AMD can't lower their prices, because their chips really are that much more expensive to produce. Provided that there are consumers out there who are willing to pay more for an AMD chip because they think it's better, then AMD will continue to service that market. If no one is willing to pay more for AMD chips then that means that AMD is offering an inferior product at a higher price and they would deserve to go out of business. That's not "anti-competitive" that's "competitive".

So the result might be that some stores would only sell Intel and other stores would only sell AMD. But I don't see how this practice can be looked as "anti-competitive". It's actually very competitive. It's one way to get lower prices for products which helps the consumer.

"The Europeans began their investigation in July 2007, and their findings should help U.S. regulators, said David Balto, a senior f

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[xenolion]

Im going to say they wont add anything to their current prices only onto their "Newest" just on the market stuff and drop the price on whats out their to keep people from seeing this added on item. Any time a government fines or taxes a company they always pass it down to the consumer its always added to the newest thing they send out the door so people see the price and say it that much cause its new.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Splab]

Are you trolling or just plain old retarded?

Interl is being sued for 1 billion euroes, that is chump change compared to the bailouts being issued. And as other siblings have said, EU is happily suing within own borders.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[noundi]

How to prevent being fined for anti competative behaviour:

Step 1: Instead of encouraging customers to not buy other vendors products, encourage customers to buy your products.

That wasn't so hard now was it?

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[noundi]

I hope they do. Apparently the US is doing a shit job to prevent anti competative behaviour like this. It's nice to know the consumer in EU is still worth more than shit. I for one welcome AMD back into the game that Intel stole .

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[JasterBobaMereel]

Intel currently makes more money in Europe than it does in the US? ...and has more employees outside the US than in it ... it is only nominally a US company?

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[elrous0]

1 billion Euros is not "chump change" in any sense. Yes, the total bailouts are ultimately going to go over a trillion Euros, but any time a SINGLE COMPANY is fined even a thousandth of a trillion Euros, that's REAL money. It's kind of sad when we've reached the point where $1.4 billion seems like "chump change."

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[noundi]

No, I'm pretty sure you didn't. No wait! Nope false alarm again.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[mdwh2]

Aside from being an unfounded accusation, it wouldn't really make sense anyway. Intel still have European offices, employ Europeans, have European shareholders, and are very much a part of the economy. So if this really was some money-making scheme on the part of the Government, why not fine European companies too (as in fact they do)? Or if they were worried about the affect on European companies, then they'd surely share that concern over Intel too.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[elrous0]

In all fairness to Intel, I've used both Intel and AMD chips over the years (I was a big fan of AMD back when the Athlon 64 was blowing away Intel's chips). But the reason I went with Intel on my last upgrade wasn't because of any anti-competitive behavior (Newegg certainly wasn't bullied into not carrying AMD), it's because Intel's Core 2 chips were a lot better than AMD's chips. I'm glad to have AMD in the game too, but this ruling isn't going to make their chips any better.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Colonel Korn]

Step 1: Find a large wealthy company.

Step 2: Fine them for anti-competitive behaviour.

That puts you further into a recession unless that money then goes back to people who can spend it.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[noundi]

It's exactly this kind of mentality that creates the problem. Somewhere along the axis of time US corporations felt it was ok to behave in this way. Of course the US haven't done much to prevent this, no trolling, the article speaks for itself not to mention the MS fine also dealt by the EU. If the US wouldn't look the other way just because it's a big corporation we wouldn't have this problem to begin with.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[lamadude]

The Commission has fined tons of EU companies over the years as well, and not just large companies. But the fact of the matter is that if the company is large and wealthy you need a large fine that is proportional with the damage caused by the anti-competitive behavior. Otherwise their behavior won't be influenced at all. Without anti-competitive regulators we would be stuck with tons of monopoly's and cartels, which is the perfect way to get in an even deeper recession.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's nothing like that, but nice karma whoring

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Anonymous Coward]

First, read the actual comments made by Kroes respecting the EU's findings. Your above comments are very wide of the mark.

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/09/241&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[scumdamn]

And if AMD had the share they deserved back when Athlon 64 was blowing away Intel they would have made more money and had more money for R&D in which case would have likely been able to keep up with Intel. The cause and effect is pretty obvious. That AMD couldn't even give away a million free chips to a computer manufacturer makes it pretty obvious that something was mighty fishy.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[maxume]

Intel maintains (Of course!) that they never sold below cost.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[scumdamn]

They had evidence from emails that these secret deals were occurring and AMD couldn't even give a computer manufacturer a million free chips because Intel would punish them. That's blatantly illegal. So if your argument is that Intel shouldn't have to obey the law, then that argument encourages illegal behavior.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Anonymous Coward]

...is fined even a thousandth of a trillion Euros...

If only there were some smaller numerical denomination, equivalent to a thousandth of a trillion, that we could substitute to make our posts more succinct...

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[edmudama]

how much do you pay for two tablespoons of beach sand?

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[maxume]

How special is it?

More seriously, I'm not sure that is the sort of obfuscation that someone at the C level would be willing to make, they do occasionally get personally held to account.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[InsurrctionConsltant]

As arstechnica mad explicit, Intel's response that they "never sold below cost" is beside the point:

But, in the face of some of the specific allegations made by the EU, some of Otellini's statements seem almost besides the point. For example, Otellini states that, "Intel never sells products below cost," and "there has been absolutely zero harm to consumers." Both of those may be true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Intel wasn't abusing its dominant market position.

What's more:

Intel has already said that they are going to appeal the fine, and that it âoeignores the reality of a highly competitive microprocessor market.â Notably, they arenâ(TM)t appealing the facts, but rather the conclusion (that it was harmful to consumers) and the fine. Itâ(TM)s likely that any appeal will take just as long as the initial examination, so itâ(TM)s unlikely that this will be over before 2011, if not later.

(AnandTech)

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[QuantumRiff]

But then that leads down a very slippery slope to things such as:

Instead of encouraging people to NOT vote for your opposition, encourage them to vote for you!

Think of the loss in ad Revenue, and what on earth will the 24 hour news stations do with all that spare time?

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[gilbert644]

Is AMD getting the money?

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[noundi]

Exactly, and when you come to think of it things were going great for AMD. I remember the K6/K6-2 generation that was half the price of Intels chips. While they weren't "as powerful" they damn sure weren't far from it. And for about half the price of Intels chips their prices beat the living shit out of Intel. Then came the Athlon/Duron generation followed by 64 bit architecture. By this time AMD was in the lead, still sticking to their fair pricings. Intel on the other hand of course sought to expand/maintain its business to business activities. Nobody really knew why businesses seemed to always pick Intel, and thus their market share was by far larger than AMD.

I'm no AMD fan, at all. They're a business and I'm a consumer. We're both constantly fighting for gain. I want lower prices and higher quality, they want more revenue. It would be, to put it simply, fucking stupid for me to stand on their side. However when Intel began conducting this type of behaviour it naturally hurts AMDs business, but as I said I couldn't care less about AMD. What I do care about is that I was getting good quality for a low price and due to Intel I'm no longer getting this. So from a consumers point of view: fuck Intel for meddling in my business, not AMDs.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[noundi]

Interesting point. My concern isn't really if AMD gets this or that, it's what I get. I'm the consumer, I decide what corporates live and what corporates die. People seem to have forgotten this. Still you make an excellent point. Given that their anti competative behaviour was directly aimed towards AMDs business I wonder if AMD has any legal right to file a law suit. I mean this drama has a victim beyond any doubt, so why shouldn't the victim be able to claim compensation? If anybody knows how this works I'd be very interested to hear about it.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[maxume]

Sure it doesn't matter, the opinion of the EU is pretty much something they are going to put up with, and at some point it will be final.

On the other hand, if they were only being big meanie faces, rather than actually spending money to drive other companies out of business, lots of people are going to take that into account (I mean, making a smaller profit isn't exactly pure unmitigated evil, and the line between really good incentives and coercion is somewhat arbitrary).

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Chris Burke]

Oh don't worry. This slippery slope has a ramp on it that jumps right over politics.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[The J Kid]

And that's the problem. Companies with shareholders are required by law to compete as hard as they can.

That's actually not true.

A common economic theory is that what's best for a company is to aim to Maximise Shareholder Value, and that the best way to do that is to compete as hard as they can. But it's not law.

But even then, "as hard as they can" doesn't include anti-competative behaviour (or other unlawful things, like bombing AMD offices) because the EU will go and sit on you.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[diablovision]

They had evidence from emails that these secret deals were occurring...

Oh noes! Not secret deals! I have news for you, most deals between businesses are "secret" by this standard.

As to illegality, It was clear to me at least that the GP was clearly questioning the validity of the anti-trust laws. One way to challenge a law is by deliberately breaking it. I am not claiming that Intel was making a political statement, but what if they were?

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[pwfffff]

How is it sad? Do you not know how this whole 'economics' thing generally works? Do some reading on this new 'inflation' thingy.

It's like saying it's 'sad' that 1GB is a small amount of data nowadays.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[PitaBred]

You compete fairly when you improve your product, advertise, and so on. You do not compete fairly when you kneecap your opponent. There is a VERY large difference between improving your own offerings and tearing down others. Intel is the Tonya Harding of processor manufacturers.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[garett_spencley]

I wasn't trying to claim that what they did was legal. But after reading your response I can see how I might not have been clear.

I wasn't trying to answer "is what they did against the law?" I was trying to answer "is what they did wrong?"

In my opinion anti-trust laws end up doing more harm (to general consumer welfare) than good. I don't feel that Intel committed a crime in the moral sense. As the other guy pointed out, I was questioning the "validity" of anti-trust laws to begin with.

I regret not making that clearer.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[EvilBudMan]

--As they've slapped plenty of EU companies with fines for anti competitive behavior, your accusations are fairly unfounded.--

Not exactly, look at the amounts.

Siemens has received a â 397 million (about $500 million) fine from the European Commission for illegal price fixing in the energy distribution business.

Siemens Market Cap: â 45.85 billion

Intel Market Cap: â 62.26 billion

That's way more of a fine for Intel than Siemens even figuring in it's market cap 1.4 times higher while the fine was 3.4 times higher.

You will find this pattern across the board. Even Microsoft didn't get hit this hard for doing much worse things IMO.

Wait till the EU gets Apple for it's iTunes anti competitive behavior and other companies that SlashDot likes? There are plenty of companies in the EU with anti competitive behavior as well.

Did the EU give the money to AMD? The US market is slightly smaller than the EU but we don't fine their companies much.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[spun]

The free market is imperfect. Monopolies, imbalance of information, and externalities can all skew the market unfairly, harming both buyers and sellers.

What Intel did was clearly wrong, harmful to the free market, and to society as a whole. Adam Smith himself admitted that markets need regulation in order to remain free. This is one such case.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[TheLink]

IIRC back when the Athlon 64 was blowing away Intel, AMD had chip shortages.

http://www.crn.com/white-box/193500828

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1014180/unprecedented-demand-for--athlon-64-x2s-prompts-shortage-fear

Hard to make more money when you are out of stock.

In theory AMD could have charged higher, but they had already committed to certain prices, and even if they could at a certain point people would buy Intel. If you have orders for 10000 PCs, and AMD only provides you 5000 CPUs, you have a problem. Worse if they are orders specifically for AMD PCs.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Spykk]

While I agree that what Intel did was wrong, don't Coke and Pepsi do the same thing? It seems like most establishments sell products from one or the other, but almost never both. I always assumed there was some kind of exclusivity discount in play.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[drsmithy]

And if AMD had the share they deserved back when Athlon 64 was blowing away Intel they would have made more money and had more money for R&D in which case would have likely been able to keep up with Intel. The cause and effect is pretty obvious.

ACtually, no, given AMD's ability to develop an Intel beater in the first place, despite Intel's massively larger budget, it's not obvious at all.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[An ominous Cow art]

(and would never have an asterisk after it).

elrous0 (869638) *

Hypocrite!

(But more seriously, well said, and those are my feelings as well.)

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[drsmithy]

Nobody really knew why businesses seemed to always pick Intel, and thus their market share was by far larger than AMD.

Because a) it's not just about who's cheapest and b) back then Intel were faster (particularly in the server room and with high end workstations - eg: 4+ CPU Pentium Pro boxes).

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Anonymous Coward]

As to illegality, It was clear to me at least that the GP was clearly questioning the validity of the anti-trust laws. One way to challenge a law is by deliberately breaking it. I am not claiming that Intel was making a political statement, but what if they were?

What if I shoot you in the face to make a political statement about murder charges?

That's right: I go to jail.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Patch86]

You may well be right that most companies, if not all, would be prepared to play dirty to achieve success.

But that's the point of governments. Just because companies want to misbehave, doesn't mean they should be allowed to. Companies competing to make better, cheaper or more efficient products keep the markets ticking over, and make the world a better place. If companies resort to sleazy tactics, all they're competing on is developing the most effective forms of sleaze.

It is an elected government's responsibility to keep the companies in check, for the benefit of the humble consumers. Governments do this by making laws and establishing regulators. When companies break the laws, the governments need to enforce it. Big fines usually do the trick nicely.

Whether it's surprising or not that Intel were playing dirty is beside the point. They broke the rules, and the EU did the right thing by punishing them.

If all the other major governments were doing their part like they should be, the world's technology and economy might be in a lot better place than it is today.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[ThePhilips]

Siemens Market Cap: Ã 45.85 billion Intel Market Cap: Ã 62.26 billion

That's silly. For Intel, CPUs are probably 75% of their revenue. For Siemens, energy distribution is probably like 2-3% of their revenue.

There was more interesting case against 3 major EU-based elevator companies who essentially divided market (refusing customers belonging to competitors' turf) and fixed prices. Since their were engaged in the activities for more than a decade, fine was IIRC 3 times of a year profit. And unfortunately for the companies, the year before the conviction was pretty good financially for all of them.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[elrous0]

Inflation doesn't increase by orders of magnitude (unless things are REALLY bad). If a million $ seemed like a lot of money a generation or two ago for a fine, then 1,400x that much shouldn't seem like "chump change" now.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Anonymous Coward]

And second, learn to punctuate properly.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Klintus Fang]

unfortunately that isn't sufficient. If you are so big that the governments are in fear of you becoming a monopoly they are going to start going after you no matter what you do.

It's not really clear that Intel really told customers not to buy they competitors products or if the court is mincing words and arguing that Intel's dominant position puts them in a position where "encouraging customers to buy your products" is the same thing as "encouraging the customer not to buy the competitors products".

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Anarchduke]

Absolutely. When I rob a liqueur store to supply my crack habit, its actually my way of expressing dissatisfaction with the prohibition of drugs. Oh, and I beat my wife to make a political point against woman's suffrage.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[mgblst]

You are ignorant. In fact, if AMD had done exactly the same thing as Intel, there would be no problem, no illegal activity, and no fine. The problem is that Intel is a monopoly, and there are some things that monopolies can not do..

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Chris Burke]

ACtually, no, given AMD's ability to develop an Intel beater in the first place, despite Intel's massively larger budget, it's not obvious at all.

Fair enough. Consider that Athlon wasn't exactly a cheap product to begin with, and it was a win only in the desktop. Today's more competitive and diverse market requires the same kind of execution but in multiple projects simultaneously while advancing fab technology. If AMD had gotten a fair shot at the market back then, they would have had the resources to carry through today. That's the gist.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[metaforest]

Step 1: Find a large wealthy company.

Step 2: Fine them for anti-competitive behaviour.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit!

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Tuoqui]

the year before the conviction was pretty good financially for all of them.

Well duh, thats what happens when you engage in anti-competitive behavior and price fix.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[metaforest]

lol

And maybe Jobs will have to flip the Platform_Transition bit again and run off to Power6 or AMD in a couple of years because the EU court just took Intel's lunch money for Tuesday.... THIS week.

prediction = !gonna_happen * ever;

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[Splab]

But $1.4B is chump change for governments. Intel might have another look at it, but when you are dealing with a couple of hundred million people $1B is only $4-5 per capita.

Re:How to get out of a recession in 2 easy steps..

[evilbessie]

Well the EU have forced the split of various national telecoms companies, forced competition into the postal markets and generally messed with things over here (there are many other things also, so this is merely the tip of the iceberg, they don't seem to care where the company is from but if it is anti-competative they will stop them). But we accept government in Europe and that it is a force for the people, it does get it wrong sometimes but at least we have someone fighting for the consumer and not just the corperation...

From the horse's mouth

[brian0918]

Intel's "crime": "'Intel awarded major computer manufacturers rebates on condition that they purchased all or almost all of their supplies, at least in certain defined segments, from Intel.'

This is called "volume discounting". Office Max and Sam's Club are guilty of similar "crimes" and "anticompetitive" behavior, it seems.

Such a bullshit violation of the right to set the terms of your contract. When you sign a contract with a company offering a product or service, do you merely read the terms of the agreement, or do you also consider the consequences on your lost service to other companies? Of course you don't do the latter, but that's what the EU claims you must do.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a bit of a difference between offering a volume discount and a discount that specifically hinges on you not purchasing a competitor's products.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between a requirement to buy office supplies from Office Max, and a discount for buying in bulk, should be obvious even to a Slashdotter.

The EU claims no such thing.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Pulzar]

This is called "volume discounting".

Volume discounting means "buy more and we give you a discount". What they were doing was "don't buy from others and we give you a discount.. you don't even have to buy more from us". There's a very clear difference between that and Sam's Club's discounts.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[imashination]

Office max and sams club dont threaten to revoke your rebate if you go down the road and also decide to buy something from another store.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[ByOhTek]

I think the difference here is that Office Max can't give you a bulk discount contingent on you not buy from staples.

Ex (ok):
Office Max: Pens are $1/ea, but if you buy 100,000+, they are $0.75/ea
Ex (not ok):
Office Max: Pens are $1/ea, but if you buy 100,000+ AND no more than 10% of your purchased inventory comes from our competators, they are $0.75/ea

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Andy_R]

Office Max and Sam's Club are not in a monopoly position, so the laws on monopoly abuse don't affect them. If they became monopolies, they would indeed have to stop anticompetitive behaviour.

All the EU claims you must not do is leverage a monopoly position to crush your opposition, which is a very sensible law indeed.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[drinkypoo]

Intel's "crime": "'Intel awarded major computer manufacturers rebates on condition that they purchased all or almost all of their supplies, at least in certain defined segments, from Intel.'

This is called "volume discounting". Office Max and Sam's Club are guilty of similar "crimes" and "anticompetitive" behavior, it seems.

You are wrong because a rebate happens after the fact. A volume discount is provided up front. Intel has always provided volume discounts, and still does, and nobody is complaining about that. The complaint is that intel is instead promising to give money if the manufacturer shuns AMD, then delivering the payment. This is similar to Microsoft threatening to raise OEM prices if OEMs bundled certain software or sold machines with other operating systems installed.

The Commission decision found Intel guilty of two practises - of offering PC makers rebates for buying all, or most, of their chips from Intel. Secondly it was found guilty of making direct payments to a retailer if it only stocked Intel machines.

The second case is pretty clearly anticompetitive; the first case is, after thinking about it for like two fucking seconds also quite anticompetitive. You're FREE to say "if you buy ten times as many units from me, I'll give you a discount." That's not what's happening here. Instead, it's "I'll give you this great price, but only if you don't buy anything from my competitor." Maybe you think that should be legal, okay. But it's still different from a volume discount.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[lalena]

Offering discounts and requiring a certain number of units to be sold to get that discount is legal. Limiting the number of units they buy from the competition or not allowing them to sell AMD is not legal.
To follow the OfficeMax example, the more paper I buy from OfficeMax, the better my discount. OfficeMax doesn't revoke my discount if I buy something from Staples - as long as I hit the agreed upon quota to receive the discount.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

Volume discounting is just fine, as long as you don't require your client not to shop at your competitor's store.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[backwardMechanic]

Especially when the competition happen to be quite a lot smaller than you are. I good day for AMD, and freedom for real competition. I can put up with straight bananas for this.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[gurps_npc]

There is a difference between a 10 year old kid threatening to beat up you and your mom and a professional soldier doing the same thing, while holding a loaded rifle.

It is legal and ethical for a non-monoplistic company to offer volume discounts.

It is NOT legal and NOT legal for the single biggest chip maker to insist you don't buy their competitor's product except in minimalistic amounts.

The differences are

1. Volume discounts are not affected by your purchases from a competitor. They are simple standardized discounts.

2.When you are so big and powerful that your clients literally fill threatened and has no choice but to acccept the terms of your contract, then yes the government DOES get to affect the terms of the contract.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Stormwatch]

No, it's more like... well, imagine I have a fast food joint.

Burger: $ 5.
Special offer: 3 burgers for $ 10.

Now, that is fine. What Intel did was more like:

Burger: $ 5.
Special offer: 3 burgers for $ 10, as long as you swear to not buy anything from that other restaurant across the street.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[91degrees]

Yeah. The difference is about a billion Euros

Re:From the horse's mouth

[__aarzwb9394]

Don't let the truth get in the way of your fervent belief that the EU is a bunch corrupt filthy, socialist pigs who simply cannot let the holy market do its wondrous work.

They offered a discount if customers promised not to use competitor's products.

Seems to me like a perversion of market purity. They should be cast into the flames to be purged, no?

Re:From the horse's mouth

[iamhigh]

Instead, it's "I'll give you this great price, but only if you don't buy anything from my competitor."

But haven't I heard of people becoming the "exclusive" supplier for companies? Isn't this really just a normal business tactic?

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

Office Max and Sam's Club are not in a monopoly position, so the laws on monopoly abuse don't affect them.

Neither is Intel.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Carewolf]

Isn't this really just a normal business tactic?

Yes, but like doping in bicycling, but it is also against the rules. Many European businesses have been fined for doing that. Hopefully the practice will stop soon, or at least stop from being the norm.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[xouumalperxe]

From what I understand, the way it was done was subtler than that. "We estimate you need 100k pens, so if you buy 90k+, you buy at discount". "Oh, you need 50k pens? We'll offer a discount starting at 45k purchases". Essentially, they never explicitly say "you can't have more than 10% of your stock in AMD products", but, by tailoring their bulk prices on a per-client base, they effectively achieve the same effect.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6114977.html

I find it somewhat funny that in the world of IP, this sort of thing is a-okay.

EA: ok, we would like to purchase the rights to use your franchise in a series of games.
NFL: Ok, sure.
EA: oh, and btw, you can't license these rights to our competition either.
NFL: sure no problem.

Wait, funny isn't the right word...

Re:From the horse's mouth

[drinkypoo]

But haven't I heard of people becoming the "exclusive" supplier for companies? Isn't this really just a normal business tactic?

It depends; you can be the exclusive supplier if they're simply not buying from anyone else because they have decided your solution is the one to go with. It's pretty hard to actually get caught acting anticompetitively if you're smart, which is why odds are if you're actually hearing about a violation, it's a major one.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

You do of cause realize that is the opposite situation right?

The buyer make demands from the seller.

Further more, that is an exclusive license for ONE product not all products NFL make.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did everyone decide that the government's of the world need to be a nanny? I just don't understand...

When did everyone start trusting government? It's just foolish to assume anything your government does is A-OKAY (no matter where in the world you are right now). Blah! Is there any place left on earth where one can have liberties besides those specifically granted by /A/ government anymore?

I mean, I have choice of my doctor/health care provider now, because they work for money (and as long as I can get a loan, their services are available -- you can even find doctors that will help you finance any procedure they provide with no middle men/co.'s. My dentist does this by holding my balance with minimal interest (2% -- for inflation I guess). HOWEVER, you want to just let the government (read: Obama admin.) take the money you would spend on doctors, take a fee out of it, and give it back to the same people who would have gotten it without the government. The only difference is now the government has control of you and your docotors decision BECAUSE THEY HAVE EXTORTED YOUR MEDICAL MONEY.

In short: Where the hell does any benefit come from government controlling health care industry? (Let alone any other industry.)

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

It is NOT legal and NOT legal...

Wow. Intel was so bad that it was illegal twice!

Re:From the horse's mouth

[2obvious4u]

It is usually a retail shop that gets an "exclusive" on a product. Meaning that Target has something Walmart doesn't.

It is not a manufacturer supplying Target and Walmart at the exclusion of all other manufacturers. That hurts competition.

The "exclusive" you describe is like "Metal Gear Solid" on the PS3 which is not on the XBOX or WII. There is nothing wrong with that since they are not stopping the building of competitive products.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

But Intel is.

Anti-trust law does not wait for company to be a complete monopoly with no more competitor in the market to react, there would be no point.

They're design to prevent company with 'monopoly power' to crush the competitor.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[_avs_007]

Not quite.. It's irrelevant if the discount is provided up front or not. The rationale for providing one over the other is for the books. A volume discount reflects transaction price. A rebate maintains the original transaction price, but the rebate can be listed as a separate "expense".

But anyways, from Intel's perspective, they still feel like they did no wrong... How about this twist:

Bob and Jim both make chips.

It costs bob $10 to make a chip, but it costs Jim $14 to make a chip.

Kathy makes a doodad using one of the chips. Kathy posts on her website that she sold 100 doodads in 2008.

Bob tells Kathy he'll sell her chips for $20. Bob tells Kathy that as a bonus if she buys > 50 chips she'll get a $250 rebate by mail. Bob tells Kathy that if she buys > 80 chips, she'll get an additional rebate of $470.

Meanwhile later that day, Jim talks to Kathy and says his firm price is $15 per chip...

That night kathy crunches some numbers, and determines that if she buys 90 chips from Bob, she'll get a total rebate of $720. She figures out that if she subtracts that amount from the $1800 it would cost her to buy the 90 chips, she ends up only paying $12 per chip, which is cheaper than Jim. She talks to her sales team, and they are confident they can sell between 90-100 doodads this next year, so she decides that she'll buy 90 chips from Bob, but will hold off on buying any more chips until halfway through the year to see how sales go...

So the next year, she only sells doodads that use Bob's chips and none that use Jim's chips, until August when she determines she's running low on chips, and decides to buy 10 chips from Jim for $15 each, since she doesn't qualify for a volume rebate from Bob.

At the end of the year, Jim goes to his friend Frank, who is a police officer, and says that Bob used his market dominance on Kathy to give her a rebate if she didn't buy any chips from Jim.

Frank looks at Kathy's purchase orders and notices that Kathy bought only from Bob and none from Jim back in January. He also finds records from Bob's ISP indicating that he looked at Kathy's sales reports for the previous year.

Jim tells franks that he crunched the numbers as said that if he wanted to sell 90 chips to Kathy for the price that Bob did including his rebates, Jim would lose money on each and every chip sold.

Frank determined that since Bob knew that Kathy only sold 100 doodads in 2008, that the rebate offer if she buys > 80 doodads was done on purpose to prevent her from buying chips from Jim because Jim would not be able to match that price, and consequently arrests Bob and throws him in jail for anti-trust...

Point being: Intel's contention is that they never agreed that a term of their rebate was for the receiver to not sell AMD products... Using this above example, it can be quite easy to see how a third party might mis-interpret what happened as being exactly that...

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider the difference being "The only store that can sell Intel products" and being "A store that can only sell Intel products"

Re:From the horse's mouth

[_avs_007]

They offered a discount if customers promised not to use competitor's products.

Actually, from what I understand this isn't directly the case. This verbiage was not in the contract. The EU Commissioner believes that the end-result was that. That's very different.

Intel basically is saying the EU is thinking 1+1=3, because customers that received a rebate may have refrained from buying from AMD, but the contract clause didn't explicitly state this as a requirement. Just because the customer only bought from Intel doesn't mean the rebate was paid BECAUSE they only bought from Intel.

Elsewhere in this thread I made an example to illustrate something similar. Where Bob looked at Kathy's financials to see how many products she sold in the past year, so for the next year Bob offers a rebate if she buys X number of chips (where X = 80% of what she sold the previous year). Kathy determines this rebate will make the chip $2 cheaper than Jim's chips, so she buys enough chips to get the rebate, but doesn't buy any chips from Jim, becuase she doesn't know if she can sell that many products, so she holds off until later in the year, and buys a much smaller amount from Jim.

To an outsider this may look suspicious. Kathy buys all chips for this year from Bob and non from Jim, and later gets a rebate from Bob in the mail....

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this called a manufacture's coupon?

Re:From the horse's mouth

[jafac]

The practice is probably legal, in a marketplace where there's more than 2 competitors. In this case, Intel has 1 competitor, and has a clearly overwhelming marketshare advantage to begin with, BEFORE you consider anticompetitive practices.

This is really bad for the marketplace - bad for consumers - bad for innovation, it's actually REALLY bad for intel's own long-term interest. Becoming a monopoly is great for short-term profits. But long term, if you've got no incentive to innovate, then you sit around with your thumb up your butt, do nothing, and your best staff leaves to go start their own companies. (which most often, promptly get squashed, if any of you are familiar with the history of the dotcom era).

Re:From the horse's mouth

[zoefff]

It depends on which side is determining the decision to become an exclusive supplier. The vendor looks to its competitors as well and knows it cannot compete, if intel is not an exclusive supplier, since it raises the price.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

If your mom and a professional soldier decided to beat me up, I would be pretty pissed too!

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Klintus Fang]

This is called "volume discounting".

Volume discounting means "buy more and we give you a discount". What they were doing was "don't buy from others and we give you a discount.. you don't even have to buy more from us".

What is not clear is whether that is actually what they did. It has certainly been inferred that they said "we give you the volume discount if you don't buy from AMD", but what is not clear is if they actually said that to their buyers or not.

Afterall, a buyer has a fixed number of CPUs that they are going to buy. period. it is determined by the number that they think they can sell to customers. If Intel says "we'll give you a discount if you buy more from us", because it is a zero sum game, that MEANS that the buyer will buy less from AMD whether Intel asked them to or not.

What is not clear is if the lawyers for the other side are arguing that the fact that Intel selling more chips means AMD sells less means that offering volume discounts to increase sales is equivalent to telling the buyer not to buy from the competitor. It sounds like this is the game the game the EU and AMD's lawyers are playing.

Intel would gain nothing by explicitely telling its buyers not to buy from AMD. Convincing the buyer to buy more from Intel automatically means AMD sells less anyway. That is the very nature of competition in a market where two companies are competing for a percentage of a fixed amount of sales.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[jwhitener]

Is the practice of given money to a consumer to not buy a competitors product only illegal if you are deemed a monopoly?

If AMD did this would it be legal?

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Azarael]

Certainly true, but in this case practically *Every* business is the exclusive supplier.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[LordLimecat]

I would imagine Intel's market position plays a role in this--what may be ok for some companies is NOT ok for a dominant market player.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another uninformed rant about public health care. I live in a country and get to choose any Doctor I like. The only person who makes treatment decsions is my doctor. The benefit is obvious to anyone who isnt a libertarian weenie.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'll give you this great price, but only if you don't buy anything from my competitor."

Actually- Intel customers testified to the EU that Intel contracts have never included these provisions. They are strictly volume based. Offering volume based prices or rebates in legal in the EU as long as it is done above cost. Intel financial statements show they have always been priced above cost.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, volume pricing is legal in the EU for a dominant company if it is above cost. Intel priced above cost.

The EU claim that Intel required customers to exclude rival products was disputed before the EU by Intel customers. The contracts as described by the EU simply don't exist.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Wall St Journal "the EU, which fined Intel $1.45 billion on Wednesday, was quick to note that it found no contracts to back up its findings that Intel violated European antitrust law in its tactics against rival Advanced Micro Devices"

In other words, they looked at Intel contracts and found no language requiring OEMs to restrict purchases from other suppliers.

Re:From the horse's mouth

[initialE]

So how much of that money goes to AMD? None? Well ok then, we'll just carry on doing it until they go out of business. Then all of a sudden it won't be illegal anymore.

How did they pick the number?

[niceone]

1.066 GigaEuros - a number Intel can understand?

Re:How did they pick the number?

[sakdoctor]

Oh NOES!!! My GigaEuroes haev been fined!

Re:How did they pick the number?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was funny in 1993. Back in 2007, I bought 400 AMD CPUs with a design flaw in every chip.

Fortunately, we use Linux and there was a software patch for the hardware CPU error just like there is a patch in Linux for the Intel floating point bug.

If we ran a propriatary OS, we would have been out of about $1 million.

Re:How did they pick the number?

[hedwards]

Lazy damned Euros, not a hard working honest currency like the USD. Perhaps if they hadn't taken in all those worthless good for nothing Lyre, they wouldn't have any trouble paying for Intel's misdeeds.

Re:How did they pick the number?

[Anonymous Coward]

1.0543534 GigaEU calculated on a Pentium..

Re:How did they pick the number?

[argiedot]

I'm sure many people here know what that is about, but which processor had these design flaws? Googling gives me Amazon reviews of computers.

Re:How did they pick the number?

[bperkins]

He might be talking about the Phenom L3 cache bug.

Re:How did they pick the number?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the old 1.066 GigaHertz PIII fiasco...

Re:How did they pick the number?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the Phenom TLB bug.

Re:How did they pick the number?

[hattig]

It was the TLB bug in the Barcelona Opterons / Phenom 1s I imagine. Trivial to workaround, but with a minor performance hit.

Re:How did they pick the number?

[SSCGWLB]

It was a Level III Cache bug in their Phenom and Barcelona quad-core processors. We got some at work, a nifty little kernel patch got us running again.

I found an article about it here:
http://www.dailytech.com/Understanding++AMDs+TLB+Processor+Bug/article9915.htm

Re:How did they pick the number?

[argiedot]

Ah, I see. Thanks guys.

Re:How did they pick the number?

[PitaBred]

From what I've read, it's almost a 20% performance hit synthetically, 14% real-world benches. That's not trivial in anything I've seen.

If you're buying a processor, just don't get the Phenom 9600. It's under $100 for a quad-core CPU, but that 2.3GHz with the workaround would end up being an effective 1.9GHz or so. The 9650's and any AMD chip ending with a 50 has the TLB bug fixed.

Re:How did they pick the number?

[Ciaran Power]

1.06 GigaEuro - the plural of 'Euro' is 'Euro'

Re:How did they pick the number?

[Anonymous Coward]

1.0659783 on Intel processors

Still just a slap on the wrist

[Pulzar]

It's still just a slap on the wrist. They've profited an order of magnitude more from the illegal tactics they used, and this just says "It's ok to break the law, as long as you give us a cut of the profits".

They should at least give a part of the fine to AMD to help them fight Intel -- that would hurt Intel a lot more than paying a fine to EU, and make them think twice before doing this again.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[ByOhTek]

I'm not sure giving it to AMD would be right in this situation, but at the same time, it is a rather small slap in the wrist. A better spending would be to look at all of Intels competitors in all segments, and possibly do some name-recognition PR (not designed to make the competitor look good or bad, just simply to put the name in the playing field).

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[Andy_R]

This is just the fine for doing this in the EU, I'm sure the courts in the rest of the world will be happy to add their own penalties for their own jurisdictions, and I'm sure that in many jurisdictions AMD (and other chip makers) will be able to claim damages too.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[Pecisk]

Well, Euro fines doesn't work that way. First, you get initial warning and fine. After that, you got monitored for years for repeated abuse. If that happens - slap, another fine, possibly even bigger. In the end, Intel will have to comply. Because it's ain US, where you can drag out case in the court. You have to pay fine first.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[Hatta]

It's still just a slap on the wrist.

Exactly. Send the board of Intel to prison, then we'll start seeing these corporations behave.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[rliden]

No, they shouldn't give fine money to AMD. That would open the door to even more government corruption than is already present. If AMD wants recompense they can sue Intel.

What should happen, though, is that the manufacturers and retailers that colluded with Intel should also see a hefty fine. Discouragement comes from burning people at both ends.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[ianare]

Under the terms of the sentencing, intel has to stop these practices immediately, or face even more fines. As MS found out when they dragged their heels during their trial. This will hopefully have a much bigger effect than the fine, and could save AMD from extinction.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[h4rm0ny]

Japan and South Korea have already found in favour of AMD and against Intel. The USA's Federeral Trade Committee began investigations last June at the request of AMD, but I don't know where they are with that investigation now.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[SSCGWLB]

Sorry to burst your bubble, couple of problems with this: First, you do realize there is a difference between a civil and criminal law? Second, the commission that levied the fine does not have the authority to throw Intel's board into jail.

So, at best Intel will raise their prices. AMD isn't doing too hot right now so I am sure they could use the help. I don't think Intel will be loosing any sleep over this whole fiasco. If the EU doesn't like the new prices, I am sure they have a homegrown company that can step right in *chuckle*.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[sjames]

Just giving it to AMD wouldn't be right, but dividing it amongst all of Intel's competition in the EU would be. One way to do that would be to effectively subsidize their products in the market while funds last. That would restore to them the profit they would have already made if not for the illegal anti-competitive practices. The market itself would decide the proportion of harm Intel did to each competitor.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[Hurricane78]

Well, it is 3.84% of their 27.6 billion € revenue,
and 27.25% of their 3.89 billion € net income.
So it's a bit more than a slap on the wrist, and will hurt.

But I agree that 100% of their income would be a better fine.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[houghi]

I hear this excuse 'it is only a slap on the wrist' excuse all the time. Do understand that it is a fine, just like a fine for a speeding ticket. If you get one you don't go broke. However it will tell you to play by the rules.
The second time it will be a bit more and the fines will go up. If you still go on, you will looses your license. If you go on, you will go to jail.

The same here. This is a slap, the next will be heftier and if they go on, they will see to it that they will follow the law.

The fine is not intended to bankrupt them it ios intended as a slap on the wrist and that is a good thing.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[Hatta]

First, you do realize there is a difference between a civil and criminal law? Second, the commission that levied the fine does not have the authority to throw Intel's board into jail.

Of course I'm well aware of those facts. The law needs to be changed so that CxOs of criminal corporations can suffer criminal penalties. These bastards effectively stole billions of dollars, and they get less of a penalty than someone who holds up a 7/11 for a hundred bucks. This is not justice, and it's not a deterrent to future behavior. Hard prison time for these criminals is the only answer.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it is 3.84% of their 27.6 billion â revenue,
and 27.25% of their 3.89 billion â net income.
So it's a bit more than a slap on the wrist, and will hurt.

That's all pretty meaningless when they can pay this with their on-hand cash and still have over 10 billion left.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[jellomizer]

Still Microsoft is a bigger anti-trust offender then Intel is. I think it goes down to a case of corruption. While Microsoft may be a bad offender there is no European substitute who would have gained from this. But AMD you have a Nice European corporation who can benefit from Intel's loss.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[Anonymous Coward]

ABSOLUTELY should be awarded to AMD. That's the whole point!

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[Gudeldar]

South Korea fined them a "whopping" $25 million, Intel managed to talk its way out of a fine in Japan as long as it promised not to do it anymore.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[mgblst]

They should make them pay the fine in AMD chips, that should make everyone happy.

Re:Still just a slap on the wrist

[Pulzar]

The problem is that it took 9 years from the complaint for the fine to be leveled. If they do this for 9 more years, AMD will be gone, and they can afford to pay any fine and still win big. Meanwhile, if they followed the law all along, AMD probably would've taken much bigger market share during the few years when they had superior products, and Intel would've lost a lot more than this fine (and the next).

The fine shouldn't bankrupt you, but it should make you think twice about doing the same thing again. I don't think this does it -- not even close.

Daily Fact

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you know that European Union's main industry consists of hefty fines for American companies?

I'm not a big supporter of Intel's practices, and a strong opponent of anything Microsoft does, but come the fuck on! Is that money going to be disbursed to AMD for lost business? EU anti-trust body has become a sick joke.

Re:Daily Fact

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine by me, you corporate fascists can go to hell.

Re:Daily Fact

[Ihlosi]

Did you know that European Union's main industry consists of hefty fines for American companies?

Err, no? And last I checked, it wasn't the case.

I'm not a big supporter of Intel's practices, and a strong opponent of anything Microsoft does, but come the fuck on! Is that money going to be disbursed to AMD for lost business?

No. Why should it? This isn't a civil suit of Intel vs. AMD. Intel is being punished for breaking the law.

EU anti-trust body has become a sick joke.

Why, because they actually do what they're supposed to be doing? You have an odd definition of "sick joke" there.

Re:Daily Fact

[LingNoi]

Did you know the American companies seem to break the law a lot?

Re:Daily Fact

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why, because they actually do what they're supposed to be doing? You have an odd definition of "sick joke" there."

No, because they are lining their pockets with money in the name of protecting people. Lets see where that money goes when they get it. I'll bet it isn't into the hands of those who were supposedly wronged by Intels practices.

The EU has become nothing but a big welfare state sucking off the tit of American industry. Waaaa Waaaa we can't compete, give us money!!!!

Re:Daily Fact

[Anonymous Coward]

When you pay a fine for violating the law, it does not go to the wronged party. This is another process - and I don't think European Commission has the power to start it.

Furthermore, the European consumers having paid a higher price for years, they are a wronged party too.

Nevertheless, now that the proofs of misconduct are available, AMD could easily win a lawsuit in the US. I believe this is the main reason why some Californian company pushed this matter on to the commission.

Re:Daily Fact

[Anarchduke]

Quit trying to argue with Dick Cheney, you won't make an impact, and people will laugh at you when they constantly see you near Dick.

The Charges

[Idiomatick]

"encouraging manufacturers and retailers to purchase fewer (or even not stock) AMD processors."

How could that possibly be illegal? Sounds like a necessary part of business?... Anyways the whole case sounds like the Micheal Jackson scandal. 'Who needs proof? He's creepy and rich just give the mother who sent her children there repeatedly a few million dollars'.

Sounds like a money grab from someone who thinks Intel just has too much money (Disclaimer I did not RTFA as per tradition)

Re:The Charges

[Sonic McTails]

It's illegal when its anti-competitive and forcing other manufacturers out of the marketplace. In addition, there are things that are illegal for monopolies that are legal for other companies (although I'm not sure if Intel been deemed a monopoly in the Eurozone).

Re:The Charges

[bigtomrodney]

Sounds like a necessary part of business?...

No. This behaviour is anticompetitive. It deprives consumers of choice and the benefits of healthy competition such as lower prices. It is one thing to severely undercut your competitor...that's basic competition and part of free market trading.

However, preventing the competitor from even being considered at consumer level benefits no one but Intel. OEMs are strongarmed, consumers have less choice, competitors go out of business. This is the Monsanto of chip business.

Re:The Charges

[TheP4st]

"encouraging manufacturers and retailers to purchase fewer (or even not stock) AMD processors." How could that possibly be illegal?

How about this "In addition to providing rebates to manufacturers that bought almost entirely Intel products, the Commission found that the chipmaker had paid them to postpone or cancel the launch of specific products based on AMD chips."

Re:The Charges

[Ihlosi]

How could that possibly be illegal? Sounds like a necessary part of business?

Yes. Just like breaking a few legs is a necessary part of running a protection racket.

Re:The Charges

[FictionPimp]

Of course rather then be strong armed, the companies could choose to just threaten to go all AMD.

Do you think intel would risk losing say Dell over pricing? And do you think big PC makers are in any sort of risk for poor profit margins?

Recently we put the screws to dell and got 40% discounts on some large orders (dozens of notebooks and monitors). Obviously they have high profit margins if they are OK with taking those cuts.

Re:The Charges

[Quiet_Desperation]

How could that possibly be illegal?

Because the government said it was. That's sort of how it works.

You're not daring to question the government are you? *ARE* you? After all, the EU is run by noble super beings with IQs of 5000 and a completely incorruptible nature.

We're going to have to jot your name down in a ledger, I'm afraid. Some men may come to ask questions.

Re:The Charges

[Idiomatick]

See now that is informative. You should have written the summary. I believe Pepsi does this for Coke products in various place where I live. Always bewildered me that it was legal. Good to see someone getting charge for it then.

Re:The Charges

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote]the companies could choose to just threaten to go all AMD[/quote]
It looks like trying to scare a hedgehog with your naked ass.

Re:The Charges

[FictionPimp]

If there is one thing Intel doesn't need to be successful it's PC makers right?

So they have no bargaining power at all.

Re:The Charges

[frank_adrian314159]

Of course rather then be strong armed, the companies could choose to just threaten to go all AMD.

Why, of course!!! Yes! I'm going to risk my current product line (already designed around Intel chips) and my cash flow to "unavoidable delays in parts shipments" by threatening Intel. Because in the "real business world of FictionPimp" I absorb the costs of back up designs having all configurations of all of my alternate sources (even if I never intend to use them) or I can turn around new designs in thirty minutes - a day, tops!

The reasons that you can put the screws to Dell is that you are dealing with a commodity item - a "standard PC". It takes time to redesign and validate your product line around different components.

Re:The Charges

[Chris Burke]

1) AMD simply lacks the fab capacity to completely serve the market. It is physically impossible for most PC makers to ditch Intel.

2) For better or worse, right now Intel is ~80% of the market. End users (the customers of the PC makers) still want Intel.

3) Not offering the product that 80% of the market uses, while your competitors do, is deliberately putting yourself at a significant disadvantage. There are companies that have done so successfully, but they have been targeted at hobbyists and high-end gamers. They are by definition niche players.

4) Offering the mainstream product, but at higher costs because you didn't receive as good a discount from Intel is also deliberately putting yourself at a disadvantage. You can either further disadvantage yourself by going route (3), or you can play ball. When playing ball means not selling AMD, that's what they do, which is what this is about -- the market leader abusing their position of power to coerce customers into not offering a competitor's product.

5) Dell is not Intel. There are plenty of other games in town, with largely interchangeable product, which is why you can negotiate better prices from them while you'd be laughed at for trying it with Intel.

6) You made a "joke" earlier about Intel abandoning the EU in response to this fine. A major PC manufacturer dropping Intel is about as smart and funny.

Re:The Charges

[Anonymous Coward]

How could that possibly be illegal? Sounds like a necessary part of business?

Yes. Just like breaking a few legs is a necessary part of running a protection racket.

So offering someone an incentive to be your exclusive retailer (ie, paying them out of your own pocket, ie, *giving* them money) is the same as threatening them with bodily harm (ie, busting their kneecaps)? Wow.

Re:The Charges

[PitaBred]

Because private industry is quite obviously working in favor of the consumer in this instance

Re:The Charges

[Anonymous Coward]

However, preventing the competitor from even being considered at consumer level benefits no one but Intel. OEMs are strongarmed, consumers have less choice, competitors go out of business.

How are they strongarmed? They're offered lower prices. They aren't forced to take those prices. If they felt they could make more money than the rebate by selling amd products, they would sell amd products.

How does this not result in lower prices for the consumer? The retailer is getting the chips for cheap then passing that on to the consumer.

If intel chips become really low quality there will be demand for higher quality chips, retailers will see that selling amd is more profitable than taking the intel rebate, and then start selling amd again. What's the problem here?

Re:The Charges

[FictionPimp]

In that same joke I suggested that it would be impossible for AMD to ramp up production and intel could simply control the EU by refusing to sell CPU's to the EU.

I was told I was wrong and AMD could ramp up production no problem and intel would take huge losses.

I can't win either way.

Re:The Charges

[Totenglocke]

2) For better or worse, right now Intel is ~80% of the market. End users (the customers of the PC makers) still want Intel.

That has very little to do with people specifically WANTING Intel. Most of it has to do with people not knowing what Intel or AMD are and they just buy whatever computer the person at Best Buy / Wal-Mart tells them is the computer that fits their needs.

Re:The Charges

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course rather then be strong armed, the companies could choose to just threaten to go all AMD.

And that's a quick way for a computer company to go under. My Q9550 will keep up with AMD's best, let alone the humiliation that an i7 has on tap for them.

Dumbass Computer Co: Yes, we refuse to ship with the evil Intel inside. Just pay no attention to our crap performance.

Yes, I was once an Athlon fanboy. Then the Core architecture came out and I saw the light.

Re:The Charges

[Chris Burke]

In that same joke I suggested that it would be impossible for AMD to ramp up production and intel could simply control the EU by refusing to sell CPU's to the EU.

I was told I was wrong and AMD could ramp up production no problem and intel would take huge losses.

Yes, because while the EU is a large market segment, it is still just a segment of the global market. Servicing 100% of that market, but only their current ~15% of other global markets, would probably be almost doable. If Intel seriously looked like they might follow through on your proposed "threat", then the huge influx of new investment in AMD would easily enable them to make up any difference with new fabs in their own spun off foundry company and deals with other foundries.

Whereas a few individual companies brave/foolish enough to ditch Intel on their own would not cause such an influx because in the global market the rebels simply aren't going to be both competitive and large. It would take Intel doing something monumentally stupid, like deliberately handing a huge segment of the market into AMDs lap, to break this dynamic. Get it?

I can't win either way.

Yeah, I can't fathom why.

Re:The Charges

[ifinallyjoined]

Um No to severely undercut your competitor means that you are selling a product below value. To undercut (a competitor) by underselling or setting prices below actual cost. Not a smart move as most governments look unkindly on it .

Re:The Charges

[metaforest]

Of course rather then be strong armed, the companies could choose to just threaten to go all AMD.

/quote>

This would be suicide for the OEM because they would be making a product their customers don't want any more.

The strong-arm with the OEMs didn't have teeth until AMD lagged a bit.... then it was on...
All it took was a little bit of something that Intel had that AMD didn't.... like maybe volume delivery dates.... who knows....

That's all it would have taken to get this ball swinging against AMD.

Re:The Charges

[jonaskoelker]

Yes. Just like breaking a few legs is a necessary part of running a protection racket.

Nononono, Toni. You don break deir leeegs, you break de neecaps. Or as de natives say

"Yo dawg; I heard you like your money, so I put a cap in your cap so you can limp while you walk."

Re:The Charges

[Quiet_Desperation]

Wow. nice strawman. There's more than two opinions on any topic, you know.

I saw this on a personal basis.....

[rimcrazy]

I was the Director of Engineering for VLSI Technology's PC Chip set division back in the 80's. Back in those days, there were dozens of companies making chip sets for Intel CPU's and Intel, surprising as it may sound, did not. The chip set business was interesting in that it started with C&T. Zymos was second and VLSI was third. By the time we got into it, and in particular, after we were picked by IBM to be their chip set provider, the bay area VC market must have been swamped with business plans of every dog and his brother wanting to start a chip company making chip sets. If you can remember too, there were hundreds and I do mean hundreds of PC companies. Fast forward a few years. Things are now pretty crazy. VLSI made it to be the top chip set supplier but the competition was intense. The hundreds of PC companies has now fallen to around 10-12. The dozens of chip set companies has fallen to 4 or 5 but still no Intel. This is around the time that the Pentium first made its debut. Now, to make a chip set, you need these very important things called "Yellow Books" ( maybe they were Red.... hmm that was a few years ago) . These are the specifications of the next CPU from a "certain" CPU manufacturer. Without the yellow books, you can't make a chip set because you have no idea what the memory interface is going to look like. If you don't know the memory or peripheral interface you can't make a north bridge for sure and your south bridge is going to be a hack. Soooooo, it was at this time that we were working on our next generation chip set for the Pentium. We were going crazy because, for some very strange reason, we had yet to get the "Yellow Books". We could and did make educated guesses as to what the memory interface should be but we did not know for sure what it would look like. Well you know what? Gee, like magic, Intel announces and samples their Triton chipset. (Which we taught them in large part how to make pursuing a CF called Polar and Draco with Intel, but that is another story.... I digress) And Andy G. tells the press how Intel was just "forced" into making their own chip sets because the external chip set vendors just could not keep up. Oh yea, gee wizzz, we get the specs the same week you sample and yea, we just can't keep up can we. Where it really got interesting is when we got our chipset out and our sales team was trying to sell to our customers, which now as I said is a VERY short list, it seems a certain "I" company was bundling their chip sets with their CPU's. You, as a PC company, "could" buy just CPU's from them for price A or you could buy CPU's + Chip set for price B. I let you guess which was the larger. Oh, yea, and if you selected the A option. They ( the "I" company) could not guarantee delivery.

So, we went from $250M/year in sales to $25M/year in sales in 12 months. Our division was decimated. I have never seen anything, short of last Octobers stock market, fall so hard and so fast.

In retrospect, I don't blame Intel for getting into the chip set business. Hell, I am surprised actually it took them as long as it did but both the tactics they used, and quite frankly, the stupidity of the upper management at VLSI laid waste to an incredible group of people, and at the time, a great place to work. Ah, well. That's competition. It was fun while it lasted.

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[Foredecker]

Great post. I was at AMD for a little over 6 yers until late 2003. We should compare notes.

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[ovu]

Without being privy to the true operating environment that motivated Intel's decision to enter the chipset market, what you describe sounds like corporate natural selection and not anything nefarious. Companies are free to compete with whomever they desire, right? Maybe there's substance to the suspicion that they withheld the design specs, but maybe the market demanded faster turnaround than a 3rd party could deliver, plus added profit potential and a pre-existing manufacturing infrastructure...Sounds like a natural extension for them.

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[kingcobra0128]

Okay the fine is okay but say they pay this fine. Who in the end will suffer, they may but in the end it will be us as consumers. This is the biggest fine in history don't you think they are going a little overboard. Unless the EU is going to give us some of that money then woot :P

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[Hurricane78]

Or maybe not, and intel just knew when they withheld the yellow book, they could destroy everyone, because they had such a dominant monopoly, and because it was the right thing to do to maximize profits when you gut no conscience... they went with it.

I'm sorry, but from what I heard from my sources, GP it very believable, if not just the tip of the iceberg. (Because I know for a fact, from own experience, that they forced mainboard manufacturers to either not make AMD Athlon mainboards, or not get any specs and chipsets from them anymore.)

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[rimcrazy]

I don't necessarily disagree (read my last sentence) but you don't get advance spec books because you ask. You enter into contracts and agreements. You act or should act as partners. If they wanted out, fine. Say so. Don't bend your partner over and do it up their respective rear ends and say , "Hey, its just business". Tony Saprano likes to say that to. Doesn't make it right.

It is not like we did not suspect what was going on, you are just powerless to do anything about it. Us engineers in the trenches as well as the marketing types KNEW we were going to get screwed and kept telling mgmt we needed to get out and start doing something else. They on the other hand kept thinking the cash trough was bottomless and waived us off. Thats ok. Our division GM was soundly punished for his lack of insight and directional guidance. The company forced him to allow them to buy back his house in Phoenix and forced him to allow them to move him back to Texas. The rest of us slackers had it easy, all they did was kick our asses out the door. Duh....

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[Deosyne]

Apparently you are only free to compete until you do a really good job of it and your competitors fail at it, at which point you get sued and fined.

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[Anonymous Coward]

To withhold a yellow book spec from you (VLSI) was pretty significant since your whole company depended on developing new products for the latest CPUs. Large OEM's such as Compaq and IBM didn't have issues. These companies developed their own chipsets and used third party chipsets for the low end.

I think Intel's original goal with chipsets was to sell more CPUs. However, Intel developing quality chipsets gave rise to the Dell's and Gateway's. Which also allowed these same vendors to ship products at the same time as Compaq. So Intel also did damage to its large OEM's. Compaq stopped designing desktop chipsets and just used Intel's. The orphaned designers moved over to server.

If we take the big picture view, Intel hastened the outsourcing of U.S. computer manufacturing to China, and in some instances engineering. With the only benefit of cheap computers to consumers.

However, Intel is dwarfed by the embedded market. Soon the central control of a Intel CPU will vanish as multiple embedded CPUs that surround us (cars,phones,tv's,traffic lights, etc) today will be clustered by Linux on demand. You will just need a display and keyboard. Now that is the cloud.

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you should write a book.. really. I admit I'm merely a groupie (okay, four year degree engineering technician), but I'll bet you could spin a yarn like Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine".

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[CodeBuster]

Thanks for the story. It is always fun and often illuminating to hear about the inside deals, gambits, and might-have-beens that took place in and around Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, and the surrounding areas during the wild west days of the PC business. Some people like to think that the technology business is about fair competition and products competing on the merits in the marketplace, but too often the truth is that many promising technologies and great ideas fell victim to the back room deals, anti-competitive maneuvering, and quasi-legal bundling that characterized those heady early days in the computer business and continue on even to this day, albeit in more professional ways.

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[rimcrazy]

Yes, it was, as the Chinese Philosopher said, interesting times. I felt very privileged to work at VLSI Technology. I can honestly say that for either before or after with maybe one exception, did I have the opportunity to work with a finer complete group of people. The Fab, the tools group and my chip set group were a collection of very amazing talent. Unfortunately the captain at the helm ran us into the ground, and that was a damn shame. It left we me with fond memories of the individuals, but bitter feelings toward upper management and the whole semi industry as a whole. I'm out of that business now and I can't say as I miss it, just the people.

Re:I saw this on a personal basis.....

[akpoff]

So, we went from $250M/year in sales to $25M/year in sales in 12 months. Our division was decimated. I have never seen anything, short of last Octobers stock market, fall so hard and so fast.

This isn't a dig at you. You're using decimate the way most people understand it. Nevertheless, the word we really need to describe a drop by 90 percent is nonumate from the non-existent Latin nonumare.

Go ahead, centesimate me as a lesson to others for my off-topic reply. ;-)

That was 2 Euros of course

[rbarreira]

2 Euros (why does Slashdot not display the Euro sign correctly when pretty much every other internet forum does?)...

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Anonymous Coward]

(why does Slashdot not display the Euro sign correctly when pretty much every other internet forum does?)

Just to piss you off.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[clickclickdrone]

I was going ot be a smart arse and say 'What, like this? followed by the symbol. It shows when you enter it (alt+0128) but not when you preview the result. Bizarre. Might be a font issue though as you enter it as Courier but it's displayed as Ariel.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[rackserverdeals]

why does Slashdot not display the Euro sign correctly when pretty much every other internet forum does?

because of the encoding they use in their html. It is ISO-8859-1 not UTF-8

Since when did /. start letting in non-geeks? :P

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[tsalmark]

ampersand euro semicolon works in my preview: €

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here.

Slashdot sucks at displaying pretty much anything

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[clickclickdrone]

So it does - excellent! (€)

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Anonymous Coward]

actually iso 8859-1 doesn't contain the euro sign.

you probably mean iso 8859-15

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Mishotaki]

2 Euros (why does Slashdot not display the Euro sign correctly when pretty much every other internet forum does?)...

try gametrailers.com forums... they hate europeans so much that their forums deletes everything after an euro or pound sign...

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[JasterBobaMereel]

About the same time they decided not to use UTF-8 like every other website ....

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[GF678]

Since when did /. start letting in non-geeks? :P

Once it became obvious we needed more girls.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[lorenlal]

Wow, that's been sooooooo effective.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Dishevel]

What are "Girls"?

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Corporate Troll]

HTML entities, learn them and love them. (Slashdot doesn't support all of them)

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[tepples]

because of the encoding they use in their html. It is ISO-8859-1 not UTF-8

Since when did /. start letting in non-geeks? :P

Since May 2002, when trolls started abusing bidirectional control characters.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[daem0n1x]

You get to see some pictures of them in your emails. But they usually wear clothes, most of the time.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[shentino]

Personally I would consider it a geek demerit for slashdot not to use UTF-8 in the first place.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[neongrau]

works for me (tm) € € €

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Bigbutt]

Mostly

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[sexconker]

Uh...
-1: Lack of reading comprehension and basic reasoning skills.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[rapiddescent]

&£; doesn't work though!

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[tsa]

What are 'Clothes'?

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[mister_playboy]

Thanks for the link... now I understand the reasoning.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Anonymous Coward]

What are "Girls"?

They had them in school, I think. And, when I get up the nerve to leave my mother's basement, to go buy some munchies, there is a girl behind the counter. Sometimes I see them walking on the sidewalk, but not often since I only go out after midnite.

Strange creatures, if you ask me.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Jesus_666]

because of the encoding they use in their html. It is ISO-8859-1 not UTF-8

So? It's not exactly hard to turn a UTF bytestream into a series of Latin-1 characters and HTML entities. /. just happens not to be interested in characters beyond Latin-1 (with the Euro sign being a half-exception); they're usually filtered out, whether in natural of entity form. It's essentially a somewhat paranoid whitelist.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[zoips]

Guys in real life.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[rackserverdeals]

So?

the euro sign is not in the ISO-8859-1 character set.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Which of them does /. support? So that we won't shoot ourselves into feet.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Since May 2002, when trolls started abusing bidirectional control characters.

So someone decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater, huh?

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[mgblst]

All I see is ******

You sure you are not writing your password on the screen?

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Jesus_666]

the euro sign is not in the ISO-8859-1 character set.

I was going to write a lengthy post in which I explain what character references are and that that it's possible to map between input characters and them, however the main point is that the Latin-1 character set is completely irrelevant to this discussion: Slashdot uses its own character whitelist, which is not controlled by ISO in any way. The actual supported character set is "Slashdot-1", not Latin-1 - as evidenced by the fact that CURRENCY SIGN, which is in Latin-1, is not supported as a "native" character. In fact, Slashdot doesn't even support ¤, putting "Slashdot-1" closer to Latin-15 than Latin-1. (While, out of the eight conflicting characters between 1 and 15, /. supports four from 1 and one from 15 (eight with lossy conversion), the Euro sign is much more likely to be used than the broken pipe, and the ¼, ½ and ¾ fractions.)

The /. whitelist is capable of identifying and handling character references (as evidenced by € producing €) so it would seem plausible that it should also be able to detect the Euro sign in the input data and automatically turn it into a character reference. As "Slashdot-1" is rather small compared to what would be possible, this is feasible.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[rackserverdeals]

Character references are independent of the character set being used.

The actual supported character set is "Slashdot-1", not Latin-1

Funny, the html source is telling my browser that it's using the iso-8859-1 character set.

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"

so it would seem plausible that it should also be able to detect the Euro sign in the input data and automatically turn it into a character reference.

Form data (POSTed) is submitted in the character set of the document it is enclosed in unless otherwise specified.

The fact still remains that the character set they instruct the browser to use doesn't support the euro symbol so the only way to get it is to use character reference.

When you type the euro symbol on a keyboard that supports it, it doesn't include the HTML markup for the euro symbol character reference, it includes the actual character.

Before the request gets to the servers, it is converted to iso-8859-1 so they probably don't even see that the euro symbol was entered.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[jonaskoelker]

You get to see some pictures of them in your emails.

I use mutt, you insensitive clod...

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[jonaskoelker]

Since when did /. start letting in non-geeks? :P

Once it became obvious we needed more girls.

Here's a joke:

Q: How many feminists does it take to fix a broken light bulb?
A: That is not funny!

While I don't want to be the "that is not funny" kind of person, I can't help but think that all the geeky girls who read /. felt less appreciated than they deserve.

I know one who has a pink t-shirt that says "01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011". Stick that in your | and smoke it ;)

Another one has one that says (front) emerge life and (back) Segmentation fault. That's geekiness with a lot of -fvisibility ;)

(and they live up to what they advertise)

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[daem0n1x]

Ever heard of ASCII porn? For the GUI impaired.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Corporate Troll]

It's hard to say... I use that magical feature called "preview". I know for example that µ doesn't work. HTML entities that are not known to slashdot simply do not show up. Most accentuated characters (like é, ü, etc...) seem to work.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Hognoxious]

Depends. What day is it? Is it raining? Is the browser version plus your user ID divided by your age odd or even?

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Jesus_666]

Funny, the html source is telling my browser that it's using the iso-8859-1 character set.

Read my post again. I said "the actual supported character set". Slashdot doesn't support all of Latin-1 (not even via references), but it does support part of Latin-15 (via references). If we treat the characters that work in Slashdot as a character set we get something between Latin-1 and Latin-15 but neither is fully supported.

I do not say that Slashdot serves its pages in a special character set; I say that Slashdot internally supports characters from an imaginary special character set. Anything not in that character set is stripped, whether it's in entity form or not.

Form data (POSTed) is submitted in the character set of the document it is enclosed in unless otherwise specified.

I think that characters outside the specified character set are also sent, but with unspecified representation... but that might be browser-specific or I simply remember it wrongly.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[rackserverdeals]

Read my post again. I said "the actual supported character set"

Slashdot sends the information that it's using iso-8859-1. It's possible they are using only a subset of it because they filter out some characters/strings for security reasons, but they can't send/receive characters that are outside of the character set the page is using. I don't know what Slashdot-1 is do you have any more info on it? Do you work on the Slashdot code? Slashcode seems to use UTF-8 by default.

I think that characters outside the specified character set are also sent, but with unspecified representation... but that might be browser-specific or I simply remember it wrongly.

The behavior I described is part of the HTML 4.0 spec. Any browser that doesn't follow that behavior would not be compliant with the HTML spec. That behavior would probably cause problems for developers.

I don't know why you're having a hard time understanding this. The euro character is not part of the iso-8859-1 character set that the page uses which is specified. It doesn't exist in this context.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Jesus_666]

Slashdot sends the information that it's using iso-8859-1. It's possible they are using only a subset of it because they filter out some characters/strings for security reasons, but they can't send/receive characters that are outside of the character set the page is using. I don't know what Slashdot-1 is do you have any more info on it? Do you work on the Slashdot code? Slashcode seems to use UTF-8 by default.

Please try to actually read what I write. I do not say anything about how anything is sent or received. The character encoding used by the site is completely irrelevant at this point. I say that Slashdot, not Slashcode in general but the specific instance used by slashdot.org only supports a certain set of glyphs, in whatever representation (as Latin-1 characters or HTML character references) in posts due to the whitelist. That set of glyphs is not a strict superset of Latin-1, in other terms: Latin-1 is not completely supported in posts by the specific instance of Slashcode used by slashdot.org.

At the same tine, the Euro sign is supported when sent as a character reference. Thus, when we take the set of glyphs supported by the specific instance of Slashcode used by slashot.org either directly or through character references, we find that it contains parts of Latin-1 and Latin-15. I used the term "Slashdot-1" to refer to this imaginary character set defined by the slashdot.org character whitelist, which does not have a direct binary representation.

Again, I do not insinuate in any way that Slashcode or the specific instance of Slashcode used by slashot.org use their own binary character encoding, either internally or to communicate with anyone. I merely make an obervation about which glyphs are supported and which aren't.

By the way, the Latin-1 glyphs not found in Latin-15 that slashdot.org's whitelist supports are the broken vertical bar and the vulgar fractions, none of which are exactly popular - for all matters and purposes, Slashdot could switch to Latin-15 with minimal hassle. UTF-8 would still be better but that would involve either separate codepaths for all old stories or having to recode the entire database, both of which don't exactly sound fun.


As for the part about sending characters: I already said that I might remember it wrongly. So I apparently did. There's nothing I don't understand; it's something I misremembered. I'm not a web developer by trade and I don't have perfect memory of which parts of each web spec the browsers adhere to and which they don't.

I'll stop feeding the trolls now; I don't want to have to formulate my posts in first-order logic to avoid further intentional misunderstandings.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[rackserverdeals]

I'll stop feeding the trolls now; I don't want to have to formulate my posts in first-order logic to avoid further intentional misunderstandings.

So you're one of those people that can't admit when they're wrong and find some way to change the you're trying to say.

The question was why doesn't the € symbol show up when someone types it in using their keyboard.

I responded that it's not included in the character set to which you said:

So? It's not exactly hard to turn a UTF bytestream into a series of Latin-1 characters and HTML entities.

But you assumed that the application was receiving a UTF bytestream which is wrong.

The only way you might be able to do it is in the browser with javascript but in that case, it's probably also using iso-8859-1 which doesn't have the euro symbol.. Even if you could, that would be "hard to do" because any stupid bit of javascript has to be tested for all the stupid ways browsers handle java script and the nature of slashdot probably means that it sees a lot of different types of browsers on different OSs.

So if you want to prove me wrong, build a we b application that starts with a form in iso-8859-1 encoding, can receive the € symbol, not the characters that make up the character reference, without changing the character-set on the page, and have the application return a page in the iso-8859-1 character set that has translated the € symbol into €.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Jesus_666]

You picked at two things. Firstly that the browser can't send characters not in the page's defined character set. I already admitted that I could be wrong on this two posts ago. I won't try to prove you wrong because you are probably right.

Secondly, when I mentioned that the Slashdot character whitelist does not allow all of Latin-1 but some of Latin-15 and likened that to a hypothetical Slashdot-specific charset you go crazy about how the server sends the pages in Latin-1 and not a binary form of my hypothetical character set and ask me to show in the Slashcode source code where exactly they use their own binary character encoding. Whenever I try to point out that I talked about a hypothetical character set, you keep repeating yourself. Sorry, but if I say in five different ways that for post comment Slashdot supports its own abstract set of glyphs and you keep insisting I meant that Slashdot uses its own binary character set (internally and/or for server-client communication) you must either have bad reading comprehension or be deliberately trolling me.

Re:That was 2 Euros of course

[Anonymous Coward]

€

European Union is a bunch of Commies

[Anonymous Coward]

To the fucktarded commies that make up the European Union all fucking businesses=Antitrust. The European Union hates Capitalism and they are the new USSR.

Natrually this comment will be modded down by the fucktarded shitdot sheeple as they all love fucking communism. Of course they are all a bunch of fucktards who should go and collectively slit their fucking wrists anyways.

GO AHEAD FUCKING FLAME AWAY OR WASTE YOUR GODDAMNED MOD POINTS FUCKTARDED SHITDOT SHEEPLE.

Re:European Union is a bunch of Commies

[LingNoi]

The Anonymous Coward read the article, tears came down his face. "Not my beloved intel!", he cried out loud.

The tears kept coming, he couldn't bare it anymore. The European Union had gone too far this time, the people had to know..

Why?

[__aarvde6843]

It must be really worth it for these big companies to risk millions in fines to making competition suffer.

I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really are after is the destruction of the competitor (AMD in this case)...

Re:Why?

[unfasten]

It must be really worth it for these big companies to risk millions in fines to making competition suffer.
I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really

http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:INTC

Gross Profit In Millions of USD
52 weeks ending 2008-12-27 20,844.00
52 weeks ending 2007-12-29 19,904.00
52 weeks ending 2006-12-30 18,218.00
53 weeks ending 2005-12-31 23,049.00

Sure looks like it's worth it to me.

Re:Why?

[jollyreaper]

It must be really worth it for these big companies to risk millions in fines to making competition suffer.

I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really are after is the destruction of the competitor (AMD in this case)...

It's amazing how many of these huge corporate decisions boil down into dick-stroking contests. You think that the major criteria in the decision-making process would be the welfare of the company, the shareholders, market conditions, a sober and rational look towards the future but no, not really. Often times the decisions are as addle-brained as some teenager crowing "Wow, this car will totally get me laid!"

Re:Why?

[Chris Burke]

I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really are after is the destruction of the competitor (AMD in this case)...

Almost certainly and OMG HELL YES.

First, if not for these anti-competitive practices, AMD would have significantly more market share. The difference in Intel's profits with AMD at 15% vs 30% for the past ten years blows this pathetic fine away.

Second, remember how expensive Intel processors were back when AMD was nothing more than a second-source supplier Intel granted an x86 license in order to make IBM et al happy? Intel does! They sure as shit want to get back to the days when they were the only game in town. And these days nobody really cares about second sources, so they wouldn't even need to have a token 'competitor' to blunt their monopoly pricing. Every single one of these illegal practices was ultimately aimed at preventing AMD from getting the foothold needed to stay profitable and driving them out of business. Because the difference in Intel's profit with AMD at 15% vs AMD at 0% is just ridiculous.

Re:Why?

[Eil]

I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really are after is the destruction of the competitor (AMD in this case)...

Eliminating or marginalizing a major competitor always looks far better on an executive's (unofficial) resume than boosting productivity by x percent.

Re:Why?

[Klintus Fang]

I know one thing. Whether Intel plays unfairly with their competitor is an open question.

But the idea that the want to destroy their competitor doesn't make sense. If Intel ever succeeded in destroying their competitor, both the EU and the US government would immediately label Intel a true monopoly and would proceed to break the company up into separate companies.

Intel has to know this.

The worst thing that could possible happen to Intel would be for their competition in the microprocessor space to be destroyed.

Re:Why?

[Ironsides]

You're pulling out the wrong number. You want "Net Income". Hell, Gross Profit of $20B is about 40 times what their actual earnings is and does not take into account several other factors such as taxes.

Re:Why?

[RightSaidFred99]

It's because there are no clear laws. It's entirely up to a bunch of tendentious bureaucrats to interpret intentionally loose "laws" after the fact. It's entirely subjective.

So your post begs the question that they are "doing" anything or that they are taking any risks. They're not. It's ex post facto.

Re:Why?

[Hognoxious]

Intel has to know this.

Intel doesn't know anything - it isn't a sentient being.

The people who run Intel know something. They know that it could take years for such a breakup to happen, during which they'll have pocketed nice bonuses & stock options and moved on to the next company.

Re:Why?

[metaforest]

It's amazing how many of these huge corporate decisions boil down into dick-stroking contests.

Oh FCS.... walk by the executive parking lot some time and look at the cars parked there.... and back in the 80's and 90's there were nice little signs at the curb to tell you who's raging cock was assigned to the stall!

Paleeze.

Re:Why?

[Klintus Fang]

You really think that the board members of a company like Intel are stupid enough to put people in charge who would intentionally take actions that would cause the company to get broken up by the government?? That is a rather naive point of view. Not to mention, if Intel invites regulatory scrutiny in excess of what they are already getting, their stock price will go down, not up. So that strategy would not be a way to get lucrative options or bonuses. That strategy, on the part of the people running the company would be a recipe for decreasing the value of their stock options, and getting themselves fired by the company's board of directors.

If the allegations are true

[sigxcpu]

It was worth it!
I would gladly pay a 1B euro fine every decade or two if that's what it takes to keep the monopoly.
(I'm not expressing an opinion on whether the allegations are true.)

Encouraged?

[unl0rd]

From the article..

Intel had paid manufacturers and a retailer to favour its chips.....via rebates...

I suppose this is a kind of encouragement, not what I originally thought when reading the summary however.

Mod up

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd mod this up, but I don't have any mod points...

(Well ACs don't get mod points, but on my other account)

1.06 billion?

[91degrees]

Why the odd 60 million tacked on the end? VAT?

Re:1.06 billion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not?

Re:1.06 billion?

[91degrees]

Because it's illogical.

Re:1.06 billion?

[Sobrique]

Because then it looks like they actually bothered to work out exactly the 'damage' caused by this action, rather than approximating a number and going with that.

Re:1.06 billion?

[Teddeh]

They used a Pentium to calculate it?

Re:1.06 billion?

[pwilli]

Maybe it's interest for the time between start of investigation/process and the actual ruling.

1 Billion + ~6% interest, so intel doesn't pay (effectively) less just because proving them guilty took such a long time.

Re:1.06 billion?

[Anonymous Coward]

2003(2?)-2007 30% (or something like that) of the problematic part of the local (EU) business capped above by the 10% of the annual total revenue for global business.

Oh well

[Vinegar Joe]

I imagine the price of Intel cpus and motherboards will be increasing in the EU very soon.

Re:Oh well

[Ihlosi]

I imagine the price of Intel cpus and motherboards will be increasing in the EU very soon.

Good. Very good. They will be selling less of their CPUs and motherboards, and their competition will be selling more.

Re:Oh well

[pandrijeczko]

That's actually a good thing.

Maybe if computer's start becoming a bit more pricey, "Joe Sixpack" won't automatically go out and by himself a new PC just because it was advertised on a TV screen at him and his old PC is getting a bit slow just because he doesn't know how to defrag.

Even the tree-huggers will be happy with the fact that there's less computer waste to recycle...

Re:Oh well

[oneirophrenos]

I imagine the price of Intel cpus and motherboards will be increasing in the EU very soon.

Well, so what? If they do that they should expect fewer people to buy their products. Maybe more customers will look to AMD's product line if Intel attempts to make customers pay their bill.

Re:Oh well

[keithjr]

That is kind of the point. Abusing their monopoly gave them an artificially low cost since they didn't really have to compete.

Re:Oh well

[BabyDuckHat]

Just to rehash what's been said already: If they could get away with raising their prices why wouldn't they have already done it anyway?

Re:Oh well

[seasunset]

Fortunately the money does not disappear. It will be used for something, as an example:

Yesterday I had my "socialist" surgery done to me by less than 50 euros all costs included (x-rays, blood samples, surgery, medication, ...). While taxes can be a good thing, it is even better when the money for state operations (I know, this case it is EU, not national states) come from fines (as one is not taxing productive behavior).

So all in all, just good things: Intel is fined, Intel will need to increase costs to the user (indirectly increasing competition in a market that was going the way of a monopoly - always a bad thing in the long run). We get more more market and more competition! And the fine money will serve a purpose somewhere (hopefully not the bailout of banksters, something we see going on everywhere on the planet: But that is actually a good example of corporations getting to much power and everybody suffering from it).

Now can we break MS in a OS division and a Office division please?

The fine should have been higher

[Anonymous Coward]

From the European Commission press release:

Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturer A from December 2002 to December 2005 conditional on this manufacturer purchasing exclusively Intel CPU

Intel made payments to computer manufacturer E provided that this manufacturer postponed the launch of an AMD-based notebook from September 2003 to January 2004.

and many other examples that no one can deny are illegal. My only complaint is that the fine should have been higher than 4% of Intel's revenues in 2008, and a part of it should be given to AMD.

Appeal the fine?

[erroneus]

I see nothing wrong with it... it is already rather appealing.

The action against Microsoft does not seem to have hindered Microsoft's behavior in the slightest and so even though tremendously more aggressive than the action against Microsoft in the U.S., it was clearly not enough.

It remains to be seen if the action against Intel will be at all effective.

Re:Appeal the fine?

[kylef]

The action against Microsoft does not seem to have hindered Microsoft's behavior in the slightest and so even though tremendously more aggressive than the action against Microsoft in the U.S., it was clearly not enough.

What behavior are you referring to this time? Including a web browser with their OS?

How dare they do that! Need to teach them a lesson again. Perhaps more record fines will ensure that they learn: they need to cripple their products. See, that will be good for consumers. Because it's certainly impossible to install a different web browser on Windows...

Re:Appeal the fine?

[Splab]

Really? So why is MS Windows now shipping with options for browsers? IE is shipping with options for what search engine you want to use. It seems MS is actually paying very close to how they behave in EU, they after all risk having all their EU assets ceased...

Re:Appeal the fine?

[chamont]

Indeed, it barely slowed Microsoft down a bit.

Hell, they have 25 Bil in cash in the bank, and just raised another 5 yesterday. And the thing is, Intel actually has some competition. Microsoft has essentially none, got a smaller fine, and continues to do exactly what they have ever done.

If the sky isn't falling, it should be.

Record Fine is a joke...

[VinylRecords]

Step 1. Let companies profit immensely based on illegal and monopolistic practices
Step 2. Let said profits become astronomically high and ignore them for years
Step 3. Wait for EU countries to need money very badly
Step 4. Claim some of the companies' money as a fine but not enough money that it's significant to the company
Step 5. Throw a giant PR campaign around the event saying that the EU 'looks out for the people'
Step 6. ??
Step 7. ?? ...

Step. ? Revolution?

Re:Record Fine is a joke...

[Anonymous Coward]

As oppossed to the US practice (under the previous administration):

1/ Do nothing while Intel et al break competition law repeatedly and destroy the free market.
2/ There is no step 2

BTW The fine is only part of it. They will be forced to change their practices and will be monitored for compliance. MS had to release a load of interface documentation and (eventually) complied after being faced with additional daily escalating fines. Intel will probably have to submit their contracts for compliance checking and they won't like that one bit.

Re:Record Fine is a joke...

[Prof.Phreak]

Step. ? Revolution?

Step ?+1: Profit!

Re:Record Fine is a joke...

[VinylRecords]

As oppossed to the US practice (under the previous administration):

1/ Do nothing while Intel et al break competition law repeatedly and destroy the free market.
2/ There is no step 2

U.S. practices are worse in terms of business and government interactions because business can directly control the government through lobbying.

I'm not saying that the EU is morally inferior to the U.S. all I was doing in my OP was limiting the conversation to the topic at hand which was Intel vs the EU vs common sense.

The U.S. government is guilty of the same bad practices but that's for another slashdot discussion.

Re:Record Fine is a joke...

[drsquare]

Step. ? Revolution?

Yes, the people will rise up and overthrow their government to defend the right for multi-national corporations to break the law and screw everyone over.

As for step 2, you do realise how long it takes to discover and investigate these sorts of things?

And yes, the EU is looking out for its people. Maybe you're jealous.

Here's the kicker...

[JAlexoi]

It's not even the maximum amount they could have fined them! The max amount is 10% of annual company revenue, for Intel that would be just below 4 billion Euros., since 2008 revenue was 37 billion
And no, they cannot state that paying that fine would bankrupt them, since they have an estimated 10 billion in cash and securities.
Or so states The Financial Times.

Why does the EU hate me?

[samcan]

The EU must not like me...they keep fining my stock choices!

Keep moving on, EU. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[Shivetya]

the fact that people don't understand where it comes from is more important.

As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.

Really, I see the EU as Dr. Evil making a demand for an amount of money which is meaningless in today's term and Intel's board just laughing it off.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[Ihlosi]

the fact that people don't understand where it comes from is more important.

People understand that very well.

As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product.

And since people aren't forced to buy Intels products, they can look at less expensive alternatives.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[Timothy Brownawell]

As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.

How so? It's not like Intel can just arbitrarily raise their prices to pay for this, if they could then they would have already raised them "just because".

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[xouumalperxe]

The fine is 4.5% of Intel's total revenue. Hardly meaningless. That said, since you seem to think a fine isn't the answer, suggest an alternative. Really. Give us some other way to make sure Intel doesn't fsck the market again.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[ArcherB]

the fact that people don't understand where it comes from is more important.

People understand that very well.

As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product.

And since people aren't forced to buy Intels products, they can look at less expensive alternatives.

Are you serious? The whole problem is that Intel was paying off computer manufacturers to not carry any competitor's chip (AMD). So if the consumer needed a computer, then yeah, the were forced to purchase Intel's products and there was no other alternative, cheaper or otherwise.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[Joce640k]

All those companies which accepted Intel's bribes? Make them use AMD chips for the next five years.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[muszek]

Well, it depends. If you believe in what GP says, Intel did nothing wrong, deserves to have a monopoly and customers shouldn't have a choice.

To GP: we've paid much more simply because there was a monopoly. Look at any market that enjoys it. First example that comes to my mind: CAD software. Polish prices, pulled more or less out of my butt: AutoCAD: $5k, VectorWorks: $500. As far as my wife's concerned, they're pretty much equal, but everyone else uses AutoCAD and she needs to buy a copy.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[SalaSSin]

Polish prices, pulled more or less out of my butt

I sincerely hope that was just a Polish expression...

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[Khashishi]

Not significant? Tell me ANY entity that 1 billion euros is not significant to?

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[digitalunity]

The CPU market wouldn't look anything like it does now if it weren't for Intel strangling the OEM market to prevent AMD market share increases.

When the Athlon was first debuted, it stomped Intel's current Pentium offerings. The supply was there and at a very competitive price, but I believe Intel forced OEM's to stop or restrict sales of AMD based computers. With a truly free market, AMD marketshare should have grown rapidly at that point but didn't.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[xouumalperxe]

All those companies which accepted Intel's bribes? Make them use AMD chips for the next five years.

Yes, that would be quite satisfying, wouldn't it? Justice, however, isn't based on what's a satisfying punishment to dole out, but what works out best for society. Such a course of action might very well leave us in a situation where AMD is uncomfortably dominant 5 years down the road.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[sjames]

That's part of how it works. They may avoid the tax by buying from a competitor.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[The J Kid]

Sure, but AMD is an anagram of MAD!

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[hesaigo999ca]

But its ok, we have arrived at a point now where the real geeks make their own boxes and create a quad core for 1/4 the price of a regular computer today! Even with Intel still doing what they were doing, we can still arrive at a more competitive market.

I say ...let them do this, but make people aware of what they are doing,
it will hurt them more in the end.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[michalk0]

in a free country, it should not bother you on what terms does subject A and subject B voluntarily agree upon. If this practice was aimed at artificially increasing the price of their products, the better for amd and its retail chain, since their competitive advantage would be much significant. Seriously - these anti-trust laws are pure fascism.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[TheLink]

You can't gain market share if you can't produce enough chips.

http://forums.vr-zone.com/news-around-the-web/85897-resellers-claim-shortage-athlon-64-x2s.html

http://www.crn.com/white-box/193500828

Intel has also had it's share of shortage problems.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[drsmithy]

When the Athlon was first debuted, it stomped Intel's current Pentium offerings.

The Athlon was, for many years, crippled by a string of truly awful chipsets rife with bugs, poor performance, instability, and just general weirdness.

VIA did more to hurt AMD in the marketplace than Intel could ever have hoped to in their wildest dreams.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[pseudonomous]

Yeah but nowadays ... if you take a look at HP laptops (on the hp.com website; home section) you'll find about 1/3 come w/ AMD processors (not counting the netbooks), While most other vendors don't offer as many AMD options, you can find some other vendors as well (at least Toshiba, Dell has no AMD based laptops) and you can find AMD desktops and servers fairly easily. So the options are there, NOW, if you look for them, and if intel starts tacking an extra "EU settlement fee" to there CPU / motherboard prices, then AMD starts to become even more of a leader in value/cost.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[digitalunity]

The time period I'm talking about when the Athlon was first released, way before the X2 or 64 bit Athlons were dreamed of.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[Patch86]

As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.

They know. That is expected. It is, in fact, the point.

The EU have rules that Intel's anti-competitive practices are making it tricky for (in theory) straight-and-narrow manufacturers like AMD, VIA and such to compete.

If Intel are fined, they inevitably pass the cost of the fine onto the cost of their products to keep the books balanced. That makes the price of Intel products less attractive to a consumer. That makes the consumer more likely to purchase off of a rival, like AMD.

And that solves the anti-competitive issue. Bingo.

That the theory, anyhow.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[thsths]

> Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.

I don't know. It is quite a lot of money, and I am sure it hurts in the balance sheet. Sure, they also paid bribe money ("discounts") for the anti-competitive behavior, but that would be in the tens of millions, I guess. The gain may have been hundreds of millions, but probably not worth it in the end.

So I think this is fine. Intel showed a text book case of anti-competitive behavior, and they got a text book example of an anti-trust investigation, resulting in a text book fine that hurts. Seems fair to me :-)

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[visible.frylock]

That's an easy one.

Makes their patents and any copyrights public domain. Probably a good idea for all IP as well.

Re:Where it goes is kind of meaningless

[Hognoxious]

Three words: Predatory pricing & google.

Free Pass?

[Firefalcon]

(European companies will get a free pass, of course).

Like EDF, Groupement des Cartes Bancaires, or Telekomunikacja Polska and Slovak Telekom are then?

Re:Free Pass?

[elrous0]

I stand corrected. But I still maintain that the EU doesn't plan to just stop with Intel. The recession just gives them more impetus to go after some big names. I suspect MS and Apple are in their sights as well (particularly given their grumblings over Apple and the iTunes/iPod lock-in in recent years).

Re:Free Pass?

[Anonymous Coward]

I stand corrected. But I still maintain that the EU doesn't plan to just stop with Intel.

Well, I certainly hope not. Anticompetitive business practices need to be punished, no matter how big or important the company is.

Re:Free Pass?

[ThePhilips]

The recession just gives them more impetus to go after some big names.

Then you misse the point of modern Euro-politics completely.

Unlike American politician, they do not do it for the money. They do it for a bump in career. Having Intel conviction on a resume would help the involved politicians in home elections.

EC is overall too corrupt. It is hard to low level politicians to gain anything there, as most of the profits from corruption are already distributed among high level politicians. That's why career for most of them is most important venue. After having a good career in EU, they can return to home country's politics where they would be much larger figures, opening up more corruption prospects.

Flamebait? Really?

[mc1138]

Wow slashdot, wow...

Business risks

[AlecC]

No - it is still tiny compared to the profits Intel makes.

The chip business is dominated by design costs - the manufacturing cost of each chip is relatively small, even for bigh CPUs. So once you have done the design, the return on extra sales is huge. So you don't want to leave out any significant market.

Also, European companies view business in the US as risky because of tort law: if your component is used in something that causes harm, you can get sued to your underwear even if it is misused.

Re:Business risks

[digitalunity]

Hasn't stopped everyone under the sun from using Intel's embedded products in mission critical uses.

Regardless, there are several very large expenses for Intel. R&D - The tooling for research is extremely expensive and has a high initial investment costs as well as maintenance costs.

Manufacturing is also very expensive, but assuming the volume is up, the cost per CPU is relatively low. Lack of demand for Intel chips could drive the company into a very big hole due to fixed operating costs in their manufacturing divisions. This is partially offset by passing some production to TSMC, where the consequences of a lack of demand is passed onto the supplier. I would expect to see more than just the Atom production go to TSMC in the next year.

Like anything, the cost of CPU's is only reasonable because the global demand is there.

This fine against Intel is only possible because Intel has a physical presence in the EU. If they distributed products to the EU region through resellers only, they would be beyond the EC's jurisdiction to fine.

$1.5B is a lot of money, even to Intel. That could affect merit raises, promotions, cause layoffs or a cutback in vendor contracts which all have a big impact on the local economies where Intel is based.

Re:Business risks

[LordVader717]

It's the actual fabs which make up for a huge investment in chip production. That's why it's important to maximize production on a given capacity.

Re:Business risks

[koiransuklaa]

No - it is still tiny compared to the profits Intel makes.

My math says the fine is way more than 6 last months profit. How is that tiny?

Glorious!

[trickyD1ck]

Yet another blow to KKKapitalism. Hopefully it will soon be completely eliminated. Now let me see if the welfare check is already in the mail...

GOOD GOOD AND GOOD

[jabjoe]

The EU is showing it has some balls to deal with anticompetitive practices.

From my perspective this is good ammo against the Euro-skeptics in my own country. Big multinational companies like Intel couldn't care less about what a EU member state says, but if the EU works together it's a heavy hitter.

Re:GOOD GOOD AND GOOD

[CmdrGravy]

Yep the EU sure works great when it comes to trade. Where it falls down is where it branches out into making all sorts of other laws.

Expect a horse's head in Intel's bed next

[pandrijeczko]

Intel and Microsoft are evil power-bastard corporations but as an EU citizen myself, the EU fines system smacks of Mafia-like extortion - namely, siphon off some profits occasionally but not enough so as the company goes bust so you can go back again at a later date and siphon more off...

If anything, the EU don't want either of them to comply to the law - they'd much rather have the fines money!

Anti-Trust and Monopoly - good interview

[Anonymous Coward]

http://tr.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4gRRk2i-M&feature=PlayList&p=5CD77AF10EBEAA54&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=3&shuffle=135

Exactly how much that means to Intel...

[MasseKid]

It's roughly 1/2 of thier last dividend, which puts it into the "won't even make us report one quarter of loss" category.

Re:Exactly how much that means to Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

It might not technically be a loss, but "profits dropped by 1 billion Euros this quarter" will certainly be interpreted as bad.

Re:Exactly how much that means to Intel...

[Spatial]

The goal is to stop their anti-competitive practises, not put them out of business in a fit of rage. The EU aren't just fining them and letting it go; they're monitoring them for compliance. If they fuck around, they're going to be fined even more. And more and more and more until they stop. I think the tactic will be successful.

Re:Exactly how much that means to Intel...

[metaforest]

Ah.... gotcha this time buddy..... this will only sting for a moment.... and then you can go back to your racket....

Until next timez I sendz wanna my collectionz agentz around...

And then youz better handz him a nice stack of that peacock puke youz getting off of our... *ahem* citizens..... say 5% of your take after expenses? Not like it will hurt much.... but ya know..... youz gots to pay the Piper some timez.....

Me thinks the EU ha been watching old gangster movies..... and taking notes.

Can I be the first to say...

[Max Littlemore]

Yay!

Yeah I know, intel has been really good to OS development of late - really good. And the free market blah blah blah and stuff and whatever rant.

But this sends a clear message. It says they don't just go for MS, they target all businesses that behave in this way. See I live in, and glean my cultural background from, Australia and here we have a strong understanding of the tall poppy syndrome. While tall poppy syndrome sounds like a disease, and probably is, it can be beneficial on a societal level in that it helps to maintain diversity, which makes us all more adaptable. Nature naturally culls anything that gets too strong in one area and technology improves with diversity.

The old 8086 legacy sucks and licks and covets huge anus [citation needed]. Compare now when PCs are either x86 or .... x86 to the situation in the 80's or 90's. Then I remember "compatible" was the word - "is this compatible with that?", etc etc. Now we have open protocols and formats, everything is nearly compatible, but hardware is still stuck in that one model that was successful for the same reason MS is successful. We can improve, and I welcome this fine judgement and hope it is followed with more.

Of course being in Australia I can welcome another 15 years of government mandating that all CPUs must be intel based. PHBs are a little more backwards over here. Dell still doesn't offer linux except RHEL on servers..... wtf!?!? Even my luddite media friends know what linux is and want it - keeps me busy.

Did Microsoft ever pay the fine?

[entirely_fluffy]

It's one thing to slap a fine on the company, quite another to get them to hand over real cash - did it ever happen?

Re:Did Microsoft ever pay the fine?

[Spatial]

According to what others are saying, you have to pay immediately. So I would be inclined to think so.

Market Conditions Forced the EU to Act

[reporter]

Current market conditions forced the European Union (EU) to act. Within the past 2 years, the x86 architecture finally killed its last 2 competitors on the desktop. IBM stopped selling workstations based on the PowerPC, and Sun Microsystems stopped selling workstations based on the SPARC. Nowadays, when we talk about desktops, personal computers or workstations, we are talking about the x86.

In this scenario, the EU must take care to ensure that Intel's only other serious competitor, AMD, be given a fair playing field in which to compete. The multi-billion-dollar (trilion-dollar?) computing market ranging from netbooks to tower-stations depends on getting the best processor bang for the Euro.

A great mechanism to fill EU's pockets!

[Kensai7]

Seems that the EU has found a 'fine' mechanism (pun intended!) to fill its coffers. Just charge the fat cows of the American economy with two or three of these fines and we will leave behind the global economic crisis...

Re:A great mechanism to fill EU's pockets!

[KoldFusion77]

That might be the case. But what Intel did was wrong. They already have a leg up when it comes to AMD. (I am an AMD guy *Because I am poor* but I will admit Intel R&D and hardware rocks). Intel did NOT need to bribe OEMS to Delay the release of AMDs units. The fine was very heavy. Too heavy. But they should still payout.

Re:A great mechanism to fill EU's pockets!

[tolan-b]

Yes because a 1 billion Euro fine is going to have a big effect on an economy with a GDP of around 9.5 trillian Euros.

Re:A great mechanism to fill EU's pockets!

[Spatial]

Don't be ridiculous. It's not going to fill them any more than you can fill the ocean by pissing in it. Nor are they exclusively fining American companies; many based in the EU have been fined for the very same reason.

Re:A great mechanism to fill EU's pockets!

[Kensai7]

They're not trying to fill them up completely, nor to stop taxing people by fining foreign companies.

Nevertheless, 3-4 billions here and there never harmed the EU! They could be used to finance the movement of the EuroMPs between Strasbourg and Brussels! :p

Long time coming.

[unity100]

South korea has already fined intel for the exact same crooked behaviour recently. eu is even late in doing it.

Seriously this is not a troll.

[yourassOA]

Intel never had a gun to anyones head and every time I bought an AMD chip because they weren't the big evil Intel I was very displeased. Why is the government trying to force AMD on people? I love Intel chips, never had a problem with a single one. Now do I have to buy AMD chips so my favorite CPU manufacture doesn't get fined by the EU government? Seems like they got a gun to Intel's head (so to speak) and are telling me "buy AMD or Intel gets it".

it is a troll

[unity100]

for you dont know shit about what you are talking. the fine is not to 'force' anything on anyone, its to punish intel because they have BRIBED computer manufacturers so that they would use intel chips and not amd. BRIBE. mark that word. bribe is something that is not allowed in a free competitive market economy.

Re:it is a troll

[Klintus Fang]

you are also overstating the facts. the word you repeatedly emphasis (bribe) occurs nowhere in the ruling. the ruling states that the contracts themselves were all legal. the EU is reading between the lines of the contracts to infer the illegal activity that they claim Intel engaged in.

i'm still puzzled by what the EU wants other than to levy a fine. they say Intel has engaged in no illegal contracts. what exactly do they want Intel to change?

Re:it is a troll

[unity100]

directly paying to vendors so that they will drop the competitor is NOT legal in any countries. you can reduce your price, you can provide various incentives with supply, or ordering, but you CANT directly PAY funds to corporations so that they will only use your funds.

if you think that is ethical, and should be legal as in united states, you deserve to step into the same financial grave with alan greenspan.

Re:it is a troll

[Klintus Fang]

Have you read the text of the actual ruling on the EU court's website? The court says that all of Intel's contracts with their OEM's are legal. There is no evidence of the abuses they allege in any of the contracts that Intel has with channel suppliers, and the EU court says so in their own ruling.

They state that they believe these things to be occurring through back channels but admit that the contracts show no evidence of it.

I'm still wondering what the EU wants Intel to change. If the contracts are all legal and above the board as the EU says, what exactly are they asking Intel to do?

 

Not all stations are work stations

[tepples]

IBM stopped selling workstations based on the PowerPC

But then IBM started selling chips for playstations based on the PowerPC. Or do those not count because their workstation mode has only 256 MB of RAM and software graphics?

Re:Not all stations are work stations

[Jesus_666]

But then IBM started selling chips for playstations based on the PowerPC. Or do those not count because their workstation mode has only 256 MB of RAM and software graphics?

I'd say those don't count because nobody outside of academia uses a Playstation as a workstation.

fines, fines and more fines

[night_flyer]

notice that fines like these go into the gov't coffers, and never go to the hands of those that were supposedly wronged.
Imagine the affect it would have on these kinds of practices if AMD was to get a large portion of the fine.

Re:fines, fines and more fines

[sznupi]

Role of the gov's should be to maintain even playing field, not to help any single competitor (and what about Via?)

Besides, one could argue that the ones most harmed by those intel practices were consumers, so the fine has a chance to benefit them in one way or another (yeah, yeah, "that will never trickle down from gov's" - but actually, EU is rather good in this regard; I can see tangible improvements around me after joining (quite recent member state))

Also, if intel will have to somewhat raise prices to recoup the fine, AMD benefits (yeah, yeah, "where's the gain for consumers you were talking about?" - in reality, healhy prices are better than too low, unsastainable ones that would allow killing off competition...at which point intel would get back to pricing practices from the 90's)

Stupid question....

[AbRASiON]

I don't know much about law but do they ACTUALLY pay this fine?
If they do pay the fine, who does it go to and what do they use it for?

I don't care how evil intel or Microsoft are, if the government is just taking cash and not supplying it to competitors then this is frankly bullshit.

What's to stop the government(s) of countries to start up some kind of frivolous lawsuit against another huge company just because they need big dollars?
When is it apples turn, sony's turn? Etc

Unless this money is put to sensible use then I honestly don't see what right they have to demand the cash.

Re:Stupid question....

[sznupi]

intel was harming the market. Market gets even.

Also, EU isn't that bad in sensibly using money. And AMD will benefit because another such behaviour from intel won't be looked at lightly (they will be under watchfull eye for several years, and if it happens again...bam! Another fine. If that won't change them...another one!) This means those illegal practices cease to be sustainable for them; otoh prices of CPUs need to be healthy / sustainable now, so there's no way intel can wage price war to the bottom - AMD benefits again.

(oh, and the fine must be put immediatelly into bank account...where it will sit until appeals end)

PS. Those fines are pocket change to EU (or even to most member states), it won't do anything for its budget. Also, EU usualy fines...european companies (you just don't hear about it on slashdot)

Re:Stupid question....

[PitaBred]

Supplying it to competitors? Why? Intel essentially took the cash from the consumers, not AMD. So the fine will go to the EU general fund, and reduce the amount that consumers need to pay for various government functions and such.
The whole point of these laws is CONSUMER protection, not protection of individual companies. What if Intel had 15 competitors? How would things be divided up? Intel's actions harmed the EU consumer, so the consumer is the one that gets the benefit of the fine. AMD's reward is Intel stopping it's bullshit.

Re:Stupid question....

[Xuranova]

Yea I bet. I'll believe it when someone can show me the modified EU taxes and fees for 2010 reflecting the 1.45 billion Intel 'donated'.

The people aren't going to see any benefit from this.

Re:Stupid question....

[AbRASiON]

Exactly, this is my entire point, where is the benefit to ANYONE but government employees and coffers in this situation?

Re:Stupid question....

[Nocturna81]

To start a bad car analogy: if you get fined for breaking the speed limit and getting caught, will the money you pay for the fine go to the people in the street you've been speeding (assuming this was a downtown area)? Because this is basically what you're saying. Also, others before me have explained this rather more eloquent. It's a fine, not a case of AMD vs Intel. And lets not forget VIA if there's to be a payout for Intels competitors..

Re:Stupid question....

[Jesus_666]

You do realize that a government (and the EU is rather close to one) is not a for-profit organization? Non-tax money in government coffers is usually a good thing from the citizen's point of view; it allows the government to do things without having to use tax money. Such as, yes, paying wages.

Re:Stupid question....

[Archimboldo]

The benefit is in the disincentive for a company to engage in unfair business practices. This benefits competing companies like AMD.

To grant your point its due, the money itself probably will be wasted, just like other fine money is probably wasted.

Roast Intel... ROAST!

[KoldFusion77]

"...Intel said they will appeal the fine...." Intel PAID a leading OEM Manufacturer to delay sales of a new AMD CPU model and offered kickback payments for units sold with Intel chips. Intel deserves to burn in hell! Just shows that Intel must not have faith in their own silicone if they pay to make sure AMDs dont get released by OEMs. The move was DIRTY and bullshit. If I can help it I won't EVER by an Intel based anything. So I guess no Mac for me

Re:Roast Intel... ROAST!

[Spatial]

Now that you mention it, why don't Apple PCs use any AMD chips? They're often better value and have the same compatibility.

Just shows that Intel must not have faith in their own silicone

Damn it Jim, I'm a CPU company not a plastic surgeon!

Re:Roast Intel... ROAST!

[Chris Burke]

Now that you mention it, why don't Apple PCs use any AMD chips? They're often better value and have the same compatibility.

Oh, that one's easy and doesn't (necessarily, who knows what went on behind closed doors) involve illegal Intel business practices.

Apple switching away from PowerPC was a risky move. They didn't want to make the move appear more risky by picking the underdog x86 supplier. And they like their hardware to be homogenous, which is why they went with only one supplier. If you're going to pick one x86 supplier...

Also, the main reason they left IBM was because they felt IBM's mobile cpu roadmap was inadequate. Well especially at that time, Intel simply had the more impressive mobile roadmap than AMD.

Re:Roast Intel... ROAST!

[KoldFusion77]

The answer to this might include yet another anti-trust suit

Re:Roast Intel... ROAST!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that you mention it, why don't Apple PCs use any AMD chips? They're often better value and have the same compatibility.

Apple is a 'premium product' company, not a 'value product' company.

If you watch the 2005 Stevenote where he announced the Intel transition with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that he knew what was coming in 2006 (Core 2), and that this was why they decided to finally go ahead and do it.

I'd guess that he also knew what AMD had coming, so he probably knew in advance what we know now: ever since the launch of Core 2, AMD has been unable to compete with Intel in certain market segments, and those turn out to be the ones which Apple cares about.

Most of Apple's systems use midrange to high end mobile Core 2 Duo CPUs. The only Macs which don't are XServe and Mac Pro, which use Xeon workstation/server CPUs. Steve Jobs is obsessed with quiet, small systems, so even desktop machines like the iMac and Mac mini get notebook parts with lower cooling requirements.

Because Apple likes to make premium machines, they don't ever use budget CPUs, and the truth is that AMD simply does not have any mobile processors which are competitive outside the budget segment and maybe the low part of the midrange. For example, outside of the MacBook Air (which needs an ultra low power CPU), the slowest CPU Apple currently ships is a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo (in the low end Macbook and Mac mini). AMD's fastest top of the line mobile processor is 2.3 GHz. It has lower performance and uses more power than that 2.0 GHz Core 2.

People who think that AMD's current position is solely the result of Intel's anticompetitive actions are fooling themselves... Intel has enjoyed a very solid technical lead in all but one area from 2006 onwards, and with Nehalem, they've eliminated that last corner.

Re:Roast Intel... ROAST!

[Spatial]

Your post is a pretty good explanation.

People who think that AMD's current position is solely the result of Intel's anticompetitive actions are fooling themselves... Intel has enjoyed a very solid technical lead in all but one area from 2006 onwards, and with Nehalem, they've eliminated that last corner.

I don't. Intel do have an obvious technical lead, my current system has an Intel CPU because of this. Only recently has AMD caught up with the Core 2 range. I had forgotten that the Phenom II CPUs weren't around back when Apple were changing the architecture of their PCs. Intel's lead was much greater back then.

Re:Roast Intel... ROAST!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had forgotten that the Phenom II CPUs weren't around back when Apple were changing the architecture of their PCs.

Well, it's not just historical though -- from Apple's perspective, that's still where AMD is at. Maybe worse, even. AMD has not made a mobile version of Phenom or Phenom II yet. Turions all use a slightly tweaked version of the K8 (Opteron/A64) core, and are not (so far as I know) manufactured on AMD's 45nm process yet.

Mobile has been a major weakness for AMD for a long time. Even when AMD had clear technical leadership on the desktop and in servers, Intel had much better mobile CPUs.

The three Slashdot-eers

[Firefalcon]

Now witness the final battle between Captain Obvious and the Mighty Sarcasmo!

...And Commander Cliche checks in.

The three of us together can bring the world to its knees! (With laughter)...

Re:The three Slashdot-eers

[metaforest]

Ok break is over....

Back on your heads!

Nothing to see here.....

And don't drink coffee at your desk moron.... didn't they teach you anything at the ivory tower? Computers and hot brownian liquids don't mix!

Re:The three Slashdot-eers

[stjobe]

But... But... It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion!

(Behold the might of my repertoire of Clichés! You will succumb to my powers! Muahahahaha!)

Re:The three Slashdot-eers

[metaforest]

Does that mean you have brown stains around your lips instead of purple ones?

Ok who let that over-caffeinated Mentat in here?

gigi

[Anonymous Coward]

1.066 GigaEuros - a number Intel can understand?

Are you sure it's not GigiEuros?

Parent offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

You are trolling and off topic. This thread is for the discussion of Intel's fine and you are trying to open a discussion of whether or not Microsoft's fine was just. That's off topic.

Furthermore, it's been pointed out dozens of times in dozens of discussions that MS was fined not for including a browser with the OS, but for giving the customer no option to unbundle said browser. That's trolling.

Re:Parent offtopic

[kylef]

You are trolling and off topic. This thread is for the discussion of Intel's fine and you are trying to open a discussion of whether or not Microsoft's fine was just. That's off topic.

The grandparent is the one who brought up the Microsoft fine, using the argument that Microsoft is still non-compliant, and therefore the fine against against BOTH companies (yes, on-topic) was "not enough".

I was attempting to point out, using something called sarcasm, that this comparison of cases is specious. Intel was apparently paying companies to use their products exclusively. The EU has never claimed anything like this against Microsoft.

The other point is that anti-competition laws are written such that the burden of proof falls on the government to show that the consumer has been injured somehow. That's MISSING from this argument so far, or at least no one has reported how the Commission came to that conclusion. In that respect, this is similar to the recent EU case against Microsoft Internet Explorer.

On a side note, I'm sick and tired of "Microsoft mods" on Slashdot. Apparently conjuring Microsoft in an argument is fine as long as it's in a negative connotation. Otherwise it's a troll. Gotta love Slashdot, where apparently you're either with us, or against us!

Headed for the Gultch

[sladetf]

Don't listen to those morons in the EU, Intel. Come home to the US where we will simply forgive all your sins via nationalization. =)

Re:Headed for the Gultch

[Jesus_666]

Do you really think Intel is wealthy enough to absorb the USA? I mean, wouldn't IBM out-bid them?

Can AMD sue now?

[DoofusOfDeath]

So it sounds like AMD doesn't get a cut of the EU's Intel fine.

But does the finding of fact in the EU's ruling pave the way for AMD to nail Intel with some kind of civil suit?

Re:Can AMD sue now?

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD's already suing Intel in the US, with other claimants in a class-action suit bundled into the main AMD suit. That goes to trial in March 2010.

Makes sense as they are both US corps.

Actually...

[toby]

There is some evidence that the EU is not, in fact, Communist. You should leave the basement once in a while.

It's about time some laws and penalties were enforced against corporate criminals! Go EU!

I think it's significant

[taoye]

According to Wikipedia (*ducks*)...Intel's net income is $5.3 billion out of their total revenue of $37.6 billion. Sounds to me like $1.45 billion will make a decently sized dent, no?

question mark?

[Das Auge]

I don't think you understand the purpose of the question mark?

Re:question mark?

[green_abishi]

my father invented the question mark

FU EU

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there no american company the EU has not brought litigation against?

IBM, Boeing, Microsoft and now Intel

      So I say to the EU, FU, you Eurotrash Socialist Twits. One day probably sooner than later, when the US wakes up and decides your security tab should be paid by you and you only, you will wonder what to do and realize the socialist paradise you have created is not sustainable.

      At that point you may need to expand the litigation to your own backyard.

Re:FU EU

[spartacus_prime]

Is there no american company the EU has not brought litigation against?

IBM, Boeing, Microsoft and now Intel

Since you only listed four, I'm sure there are plenty they haven't brought litigation against.

Re:FU EU

[Jesus_666]

You are right. The European Union has, in fact, fined all four American companies. However, it's still very much possible that an enterprising American might start a fifth company and finally push America's GDP past 2.5 dollars per capita (roughly estimated by adding up the last stated revenues of all four American companies and dividing by the number of citizens).

How ya figure?

[Chris Burke]

As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.

Seems simple in theory, but how exactly do you think that is going to play out? Do you expect Intel to announce that they are increasing their prices by (size of fine)/(expected processor sales)? Do you think they adjust prices on that granularity? Do you think that when the cost of some material used in manufacturing increases by some amount, that this price gets directly folded into the cost of their chips?

And here's the key question: how do you figure it is that Intel could raise their prices without harming their competitive position and thus reducing overall revenue, but hasn't. Are they just nice guys who don't really care about maximizing their income? Something tells me that is not the case!

Here's reality: The cost to produce an item (including amortized costs like R&D and fines) does not directly inform the price that item is sold at. It only tells you the minimum price you can sell at without losing money. In the right (or rather wrong) market conditions even that doesn't mean the company won't charge less. And they are certainly happy to charge much more if they can. Look at Intel's earnings, revenue is down, but they're quite a ways from break-even prices. They're operating at a gross margin of 46%, and have a decent profit margin to boot.

So please explain to me how and why Intel -- whose sales, marketing, and accounting teams have decided that they would make the most money selling at the current prices -- would bump up the price to account for the EU fine when it isn't even close to threatening their profitability and raising prices would probably just reduce overall revenue? Doesn't it seem more likely that they'll just take the hit to their earnings, and continue charging whatever the market will bear as always?

The only way this will affect prices in an upward direction is in the short term if some customers were receiving the "Don't buy AMD" discount, and Intel stops offering it out of fear of future anti-trust action. However this will increase AMD's competitive position, which will drive prices down. And the absence of competition is what will really drive costs up. History is clear on the relationship between what Intel charges, and how much competition they have.

You're right on one thing though, this fine isn't going to do enough to stop Intel's behavior. Hopefully continued monitoring, with the threat of further fines or other penalties will be enough.

Re:That was 2 €uros of cours€

[lordofthechia]

SW€€T! NOW I CAN US€ THIS ALL TH€ TIM€!

AMD isn't hurting

[SrWebDeveloper]

AMD isn't exactly hurting, they netted a cool $1.177B of revenue in the first quarter of 2009 (ending 3/28) alone. But fair is fair and it is obnoxious, aside from being extremely profitable, to pay companies to use your product or lose their licensing agreements. Tony Soprano would be proud of such tactics. BTW, this sure sounds familiar, doesn't it? Think of one Mr. Bill Gates and his anti-Christ, sorry - I meant anti-trust, adventures that ultimately hurt the consumer via "frustrated innovation" as Neelie Kroes, head of the European commission's competition bureau deftly describes this case.

Re:AMD isn't hurting

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? $1.117B gross revenue is one thing, and $408MM net loss is another. Granted, it's better than last year.

Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the people that may get hurt in this decision, are not the people making the anti-competitive decisions. (And I have difficulty passing judgment in any case, because markets are not as cut and dry as people seem to want them to be)

The guys in the trenches designing and testing Intel's products are the ones who are going to end up with pay cuts or layoffs if this affects Intel's bottom line.

People seem to want blood here, but forget that it is at the expense of working-class guys, not the highly paid execs or the sales and marketing directors that are operating in gray areas.

I can guarantee that your average engineer does not want Intel to force products down people's throats. They want to make a great product and have people want to buy it.

Re:That was 2 €uros of cours€

[Molochi]

This is why we can't have nice things.

They've stolen over a billion

[slysithesuperspy]

Somehow I think Intel will be able to spend a billion a bit better than the EU government. They don't have a great track record with the common agricultural policy etc

Funny stuff

[P00k13]

Can Intel withdraw from the European market to avoid the fine? Then someone can sue the EU for blocking competition and creating a monopoly for AMD. That would be funny!

I don't agree with Intel's sales practices, but I think the fine is too excessive. Seems more like the EU is looking for money rather than justice. I'm not a law guy so I don't know what I'm talking about, but I expect the many people will see it this way.

A better punishment

[Totenglocke]

I think a better punishment is to take the money from Intel's fine and give it to AMD tax free as compensation for all the money AMD has lost over the last couple decades due to Intel bribing companies.

Re:A better punishment

[BikeHelmet]

But fines are supposed to go to the government - not the companies that got hurt! :P

Re:A better punishment

[Totenglocke]

Treat it more like a civil case then -- if you get fined for destroying some of my property, that fine doesn't go to the government, it goes to me.

Prison

[TheLink]

Seems obvious to me. Jail the people who were responsible.

If you're a CxO or VP of Whatever in a big company, fines come out of the company's wallet. And if the fines are << profit, you might still get a bonus.

However time in prison comes out of _your_ lifespan. While you're in prison you can't go skiing or have a nice cocktail in the Bahamas. Prison hurts billionaires as much as it hurts millionaires.

So go figure which would be a greater deterrent.

I guess you could do fines first, then jail if the fines don't work e.g. same person or company does a similar thing again - this is to make it harder to avoid punishment by swapping in/out companies or people.

Re:Prison

[xouumalperxe]

Problem with jail sentences is... who do you jail? I'd wager that you can't actually pinpoint responsibility in something like this, and sending your best guess to jail is Bad News for democracy.

Re:Prison

[TheLink]

They already do it for copyright infringement. So what's the big difference?

In my country if there's copyright infringement in a company, they jail the managers or bosses responsible.

Yes it may be solely some underling's fault. The courts can just let everyone present their case and figure out who is really responsible.

They already spend years in the courts with this "fine the company" stuff.

IMO, copyright infringement is a lesser offense than abuse of monopoly power. But that's just me I guess.

Neelie Kroes is a cruel cold one

[kop]

Her final words on the official EU statement:
Finally, I would like to draw your attention to Intel's latest global advertising campaign which proposes Intel as the "Sponsors of Tomorrow." Their website invites visitors to add their 'vision of tomorrow'. Well, I can give my vision of tomorrow for Intel here and now: "obey the law".

From: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/09/241&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
Go Neelie!

Re:Neelie Kroes is a cruel cold one

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I might have a bit of a crush.

I've been following this case for years...

[leathered]

..and I'm surprised it took so long for the EU commission to reach their conclusion and that the fine was not higher.

For a significant number of years AMD had a cheaper and superior product but could not make headway against Intel's questionable sales tactics. For those who worked in the channel it was blatantly obvious as to what was going on.

For all you who believe that this is some kind of anti-US conspiracy by the EU don't overlook the fact that Intel have already been convicted in two other countries for the same offence and is still under investigation by the DoJ.

Re:I've been following this case for years...

[Anonymous Coward]

For a significant number of years AMD had a cheaper and superior product but could not make headway against Intel's questionable sales tactics.

It's easy to point to the big company and say that it is obviously due to questionable sales practices, but I think that is a bit simplistic.

Look at products in a grocery store. Big brand names next to smaller and cheaper second-tier products. The small ones in many cases are superior, yet they do not have the sales numbers of the larger company. Does that mean that the larger company is being monopolistic? Not necessarily. Brand identity, larger marketing budgets, consumer loyalty, and other factors all play a role.

Most slashdotters can identify which processor is better, but most of your typical consumers pay attention to marketing before they calculate cache sizes and processor pipeline throughput

Just Intel?

[anon*127.0.0.1]

I didn't see any mention of penalties for the other companies involved. If Intel is guilty of offering bribes and kickbacks, doesn't it follow that someone else is guilty of accepting them? Shouldn't they be fined as well?

In tomorrow's news

[cylcyl]

1. Intel raises chip prices 20% across the board, citing increased operating costs

2. In 3 months, Intel record revenue. Though lower margins to pay fine

3. In 6 months, Intel record record margins as prices are not lowered

4. In 12 months, Intel fined again.

5. goto 1

Re:In tomorrow's news

[Jesus_666]

In 18 months, people Intel sales begin to fall as even with technological superiority their price/performance ratio becomes significantly worse than that of their competitors. In 24 months, AMD starts closing the technological gap by putting their new money into R&D. In 36 months, rocks fall and everyone dies.

Re:In tomorrow's news

[seasunset]

Somewhere in the middle AMD will be grossly more competitive (or people will stop buying computers at the same rate in case no competition appears and prices sky rocket - as the need to have "brand new" is fading because computer power is "enough" for many years).

The world is a bit more complex that the relationship between a company and a state: there is external competition, there are costumers (who can stop buying). "externalities" matter more than this single issue. It is because of these externalities that your reasoning is 150% unrealistic.

This is not a serious comment *

[The End Of Days]

Yes, but on the other hand, fuck Europe. Why bother catering to whiny bitches who only know how to leech their high-tech goods from AMERICA FUCK YEAH! and then demand tribute in the form of fines to allow the sales to continue?

And get off our Internet while you're at it.

*bet you're offended anyway.

Re:This is not a serious comment *

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Funny, I thought we were leeching our high-tech goods from Asia. I must take a new look on those stickers.

Re:This is not a serious comment *

[Anonymous Coward]

check the subject of your post :D

What about the parties on the receiving end...?

[jgurling]

This may be a really dumb question, but I'll ask anyway. Can it be reasoned that the other parties on the receiving end (mostly pc/laptop manufacturers) are acting complicit? No one really would blame them for accepting lucrative deals like those mentioned, but they surely *must* have seen what's going on. I just wonder if they can (or need to) play the "but we had no idea!" card and pull it off.

On the other hand, it's a darn sight easier to just go after the common denominator and, in theory, the desired effect (discouraging the anti-competitive behaviour) should follow. Obviously that's unlikely to happen in practice, which is too bad.

Intel Fight back

[kentsin]

I propose Intel just do not sell any CPU to EU.

European have gone too far, they will destroy us all

Some Thoughts

[thejynxed]

Mr. Bruce Sewell (Intel general counsel) was shown on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, denying that Intel is guilty of anything at all. That it NEVER asks retail or OEM partners to exclude competitors.

From the segment:

Officials said their case is largely based on e-mails and statements from businesses, some seized during surprise raids, according to the AP.

Intel general counsel Bruce Sewell told news agencies the case is built on "weak evidence" and regulators were drawing unfair inferences from a small number of documents.

That being said, instead of fining Intel, what they should do, is remove the Eurozone-wide VAT and import tariffs for AMD and VIA CPUs, while Intel CPUs still have VAT and import tariffs applied.

Leave it this way for the same amount of time that Intel was investigated for, and has been found guilty of anti-trust violations (Formal complaint filed by AMD in 2001).

Also, according to The News Hour segment mentioned above, Intel has 60 days to formally file an appeal, and according to Mr. Sewell, they will be filing an appeal by the end of May. Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini said the company would appeal at the Court of First Instance, the EU's second-highest court.

From the segment:

By EU law, the fine for Intel could have been much higher -- 10% of the company's annual income times the number of years the company had been abusing the policy. Intel posted first-quarter sales of $7.1 billion.

Hypothetically, if Intel posted that $7.1 billion as the final tally of income for the year, they could have been fined $5.68 billion.

Re:The Charges -- Sticky Fizzball.... Beuler?.Bue

[metaforest]

Since Pepsi and Coke fight tooth and nail for dominance and neither can hold it for long..... and occasionally they both get blind sided by "Crisp and Clean no caffine.... never had it never will"

I have enjoyed watching those two Neanderthals slugging it out with sticks and stones my whole.

And you know why they get away with it? Because NEITHER of them has monopoly position!

FCS read for comprehension peeps!!!

Re:Why? or... Why not?

[metaforest]

Lol....

You do a risk analysis and it doesn't look like such a bad deal....

Oh but what happens if we get caught?

We cut some 'dead-wood'.... trim a few budgets and move on....

Business as usual....

Punctuation characters?

[jonaskoelker]

Or does he!

Wall of Text

[jonaskoelker]

(for all of you who play Magic: The Gathering)

Wall of Text
[picture of parents post]
Creature -- Wall (0/8)
Protection from line breaks.
Always remember to put double newlines in your post; then it'll get broken into paragraphs. Rather too much than too little. Thank you. We now return you to your scheduled flavor text.
Artist: rimcrazy and jonaskoelker

Coluding with Intel's is often the easy road

[Lurks]

I worked for a major computer manufacturer within marketing and engaged in a number of co-marketing projects with Intel. I say co-marketing, they would essentially consist of us coming up with something and doing the leg work and just having the invoices for anything billable land with Intel. They needed to approve what you were doing but the process was very easy. The way it worked, and the way it still works to my knowledge, is like this:

You buy Intel product and a fraction of the cost of buying those products ends up in a war chest for marketing. You can spend these funds by doing things like co-marketing activities or putting a logo on an advert (they would pay x% of your advert cost then) and so on and so forth. This is more common than just Intel, Microsoft does just the same. That's why there's a Microsoft slogan on every print advert. By the time you do both, you end up paying less than half the actual cost of the advert.

Now this is on one hand a reasonable system. Just like manufacturers have chucked in cash to co-fund ads with distributors since the beginning of time... On the other hand, that war chest is only there if you're buying their products. This makes the business case of buying stuff from the other guy all the more difficult. It means really you're advertising Intel stuff because, honestly, AMD isn't going to write any cheques. The fact that Intel's business is larger than just the CPU itself means you get economies of scale here too.

Is this anti competetive. Well, I think some aspect of it is. However most of it is just a symptom of the fact that it becomes easier to work with the really big guy. It has always been more pleasant to work with them than AMD. You get samples of stuff when you ask, you get marketing help, they run cool events, they actively assign a dude to look after your account who is a genuinely helpful human being. You get precisely none of that with AMD. In fact AMD, as a point of order, probably has the worst marketing set up I have ever encountered in my career. It was amusing when they bought ATI because they were probably the 2nd worst...

What's the solution here? It feels like it's a business that is having trouble with scale. AMD isn't big enough to 'compete' just because they make a CPU. They aren't anything near big enough. They need to consolidate into solutions (buying ATI was part of that obviously) and be able to offer manufacturers the same sort of product range and attractive business proposition as Intel does. It's not anti competetive, it just makes doing business with you more attractive.

What all of this really boils down to, and why I wont shed a tear for a huge fine such as the EU fine, is that the reason Intel is in the position is because of distinctly anti-competetive behavior in the past. I never experienced that myself but if you've become the dominent player through dirty tricks then cleaning your act up in recent times isn't realy good enough is it? Unfortunately even a billion euros is kind of shutting the door after the horse is bolted.

Daily FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Come the fuck on yourself, dude! At least get some VAGUE resemblance of facts before you FUD, man.

Has anyone found the actual report online?

[EEmarty]

Can someone post a link to the full-text of the European Commission's report against Intel? It would be interesting to see the actual evidence that they found proving that intel did these things. Are there emails, cancelled checks, or what? If the payments were "hidden" how did they find them? All I can find on the EC website is the press release.

i concede

[unity100]

you are right. you proved your point. the ENTIRE eu machine, thousands of bureaucrats, thousands of regulators, the most transparent social machine in the world, fined intel just because they wanted to, despite there was nothing illegal ........ get real. drop that fuckin greenspanism.

Re:i concede

[Klintus Fang]

I didn't aim to prove the point you stated, and I personally think Greenspan is naive. Of course Greespans mistakes don't have anything to do with antitrust issues, so it doesn't make any sense for you to bring that up.

I simply said what the EU report actually states. They state there in the ruling that they believe Intel paid OEMs to not buy from AMD, and they also state there in the ruling that there is no evidence of this in Intel's contracts with those OEMs and that the believe that none of Intel's contracts with those OEMs are illegal. Read it for yourself. That is what it says. It's only a couple pages and is on the EU court's website.

Re:i concede

[unity100]

no, greenspan has everything to do with antitrust issues.

the philosophy the republicans, holistic economists, and their church leader alan greenspan preached in america for the last 30 years was 'deregulation'.

'hands off' they said. government should not meddle in they said. it kills jobs and productivity they said.

as a result of this pressure they caused the assemblies (which they controlled anyway) and the public accept a total lack of regulation of businesses in united states. they could do everything they pleased, as you can remember from the horrible hedge fund and default credit swap scam. basically they were let be without getting any law enforced upon them.

the shitface practices of intel, microsoft are side products of this unlawful culture.

you should also remember that, something that has not been legislated into law word by word, exactly as illegal does not mean that that concept is not a monopoly, antitrust violating concept. it may not be legislated as antitrust violating yet, but it is. and therefore eu acted as needed.