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N.Y. AG Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Intel
CWmike writes "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against microprocessor maker Intel, alleging that the company engaged in a 'systematic campaign' of illegal conduct to protect a monopoly. Cuomo's lawsuit alleges that Intel extracted exclusive agreements from large computer makers and threatened to punish those perceived to be working too closely with Intel competitors. Intel gave computer makers payments totaling billions of dollars in exchange for the exclusive agreements, and the company threatened to cut off payments to computer makers or fund their competitors when they worked with other microprocessor makers, the lawsuit alleged. Cuomo's lawsuit comes less than two weeks after news reports that the FTC is considering filing a formal complaint against Intel. 'Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market,' Cuomo said in a statement. 'Intel's actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitors, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices. These illegal tactics must stop and competition must be restored to this vital marketplace.'"
Lets see if they do a better job on intel then they did on microsoft.
I'd say that viewpoint, which seems to be the mainstream on Slashdot, is like taking a single snapshot of a baseball game and acting like you can lay out the stats.
This antitrust lawsuit is filed after a precidence of antitrust lawsuits from other countries against Intel. Right now, if we take a snapshot of how Intel is competing, Intel may be playing fair. However, in the past - especially during the relatively long time (in the IT world at least) that AMD had the clear technology lead - there are quite a few reasons why there should be an antitrust lawsuit.
First of all, Intel only has the technology lead right now because Intel has more funds to dump into research and development. However, in the past, AMD leveraged themselves to put enormous amounts of funding into the Athlon and they came out with a clear technology lead. The market share barely followed. AMD had trouble selling their superior processors. The largest computer maker, Dell, was an Intel-only company. It's easy to be ignorant and blame bad execution on AMD's part - and maybe there was. But, there is some damning evidence that Intel was not playing fair. For example, AMD tried to give away 1 million processors to HP - and these were faster processors than Intel's at the time - but HP declined. Intel's pricing model was structured in a way to make it so that using any competitor in any small percentage would be more expensive than being 100% Intel only. They did this by using 'marketing rebates' that would directly correlate with the percentage of Intel processors sold.
Face it.. the P4 sucked. It did nothing but suck for years. It was an awful processor. Yet, somehow, Intel kept its exclusive agreements long enough to keep AMD from gaining significant market share - which would have in turn allowed AMD to keep spending on R and D which would have allowed AMD to remain competitive. It takes YEARS to develop the next best processor. Intel is only sitting where it is because it successfully choked AMD years ago.
For a few quarters, AMD was kicking Intel's ass - but it should have been kicking way more ass than it was. Also, AMD's financial situation is a result of leveraging themselves in order to compete with Intel and then not receiving the market benefits that normally come in a competitive industry with a technology lead.
Further, it is hard to dismiss threats as evidenced in emails from Intel against business with competitors. Or, you can shove your head in the sand and call this entire complicated situation as all sorts of 'red herrings.'
--- We need more Ron Paul!