US FTC Sues Intel For Anti-Competitive Practices

Vigile writes "And here Intel was about to get out of 2009 with only a modestly embarrassing year. While Intel and AMD settled their own antitrust and patent lawsuits in November, the FTC didn't think that was good enough and has decided to sue Intel for anti-competitive practices. While the suits in Europe and in the US civil courts have hurt Intel's pocketbook and its reputation, the FTC lawsuit could very likely be the most damaging towards the company's ability to practice business as they see fit. The official hearing is set for September of 2010 but we will likely hear news filtering out about the evidence and charges well before that. One interesting charge that has already arisen: that Intel systematically changed its widely-used compiler to stunt the performance of competing processors."

Comments

Re:Intel

[gandhi_2]

They out-competed the rest of the market, and for their sins they must be punished.

that Intel systematically changed its widely used compiler to stunt the performance of competing processors.

so what? and who is using intel's compiler? *cricket... *cricket...

Re:Well, duh.

[girlintraining]

The optimizations would have worked, and Intel had the compiler deliberately not apply them.

So Intel should be required to test out their competitors products for compatibility with these optimizations, as well as its own products? Should Microsoft be required to design Windows so that it's compatible with Norton Antivirus -- or is it the other way around? This compiler was designed by Intel, for Intel. That's the bottom line: If they don't want to support other microprocessors, why should they be compelled to? There's no guarantee that these optimizations won't fail in future versions of their competitors products in ways that can't be anticipated -- due to the fact that their microprocessors are black boxes to Intel.

I'm not defending Intel here -- for all I know, it could have been entirely motivated by greed. But that's not the issue here -- the issue is whether Intel is allowed control over its own products. I think the FTC is overstepping its boundaries. They allowed Intel to become the dominant player in the market despite inferior designs because when they were needed most, they looked the other way because the economy was doing well and the FTC was viewed as a nuisance by congress and so had little to no power. Now that the economy's tanked and Congress has (reluctantly) given them the authority to make needed changes, they're a player again. But they're making the wrong decisions, even if they're making them for the right reasons.

If you ask me, the solution is to unbundle the CPU from the rest of the system architecture. I know, it's difficult to imagine even amongst IT people because the CPU has long been the center of the system -- everything is designed around that. Well, maybe it's time for that to change. And the FTC should put its focus there -- just as we unbundled Internet Explorer from Windows -- the software, it's time to unbundle the hardware.

Re:I especially like..

[Dog-Cow]

You are an idiot.

What Intel did is sabotage.

If you cannot understand this, you are too stupid for words.

Re:I especially like..

[PCM2]

So what's your point? From how I understand it, the first one is what Intel did. But even if it was the second one, I don't see how it's "a lot different." And even if we agree for argument's sake that is is a lot different, I don't see why it should be against the law, any more than it should be against the law for mechanics to refuse to work on Fords.