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Intel Fires Back At FTC In Antitrust Suit
adeelarshad82 writes "Intel has responded to the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust investigation, unsurprisingly challenging the FTC's allegations as well as criticizing the agency for what the company calls an attempt 'to turn Intel into a public utility.' The motion is a response to the FTC's December announcement of a lawsuit brought by the FTC, accusing Intel of anti-competitive practices. Intel also goes on to provide a paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal of the FTC's complaint and proposed remedy, although most of the company's response seems designed to promote the impression that those that failed, failed on their own."
The general problem Intel has is that at a default level even before any of the facts are in, chip-making is an area where anti-trust concerns make a lot of sense, more so than they necessary do in other areas (such as software). Chip-making has massive initial start-up cost. Thus, it is like the classic economic example of the steel mill where it is almost impossible for new competitors to enter the market. Thus, even if Intel shows that they haven't actively abused their role (such as the FTC's claims about Intel threatening buyers about loss of discounts in event of them buying from competitors) there might still be a strong case for some form of intervention.
From the article "In 26 statements of "contemplated relief" contained in its complaint, the FTC described what Intel's must do and not do to preserve competition."
Right, because when I think of people who know how to run a business (ya know, an entity with 10 trillion dollars in debt), I think of the Federal government. Who are these people who think they know how to maintain competition? Obviously not people who can make it in the private sector so they go work for the FTC and act like little emporers, "sticking it" to the businesses that they could never succeed against, or within.
Give IBM 700 billion dollars and I guarantee that the unemployment would be well below 10% (or 17% real unemployement). Give 700B to the fed and what happens???
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Preservation of competition is about maintaing the health of the consumer market. The FTC isn't saying that Intel doesn't know how to make money, but that their practices are threatening to the maintenance of a robust competitive market. Capitalism without a framework of rules and standards that is about as sustainable over the long-term as the communist shadows your sig line is barking at. Take it from a left wing progressive: The policies put forth by Obama are centrist. The center has just been far enough to port long enough that most folks don't recognize it anymore. Oh, and when we gave the Fed those billions, what they did was to prevent a total sieze-up of credit markets, without which large scale economic movement is essentially impossible. What they did there was to save capitalism from the ravages of an underregulated market.
There is a huge difference between anti-trust action, and State take-over of a company. We've already seen this happen to the Banking and Auto industry. Both have been epic failures on all fronts! Do we as a nation want the Federal Gov taking over the direction of how Intel conducts business and even production?
If any of you said "Yes" to my last question, then you are a Facist/Statist and should be drug out on the street and shot IMHO!!! This cannot be allowed to stand.
Life is not for the lazy.
The Federal Gov't. didn't force a takeover. They said "here's some money, it's comes with strings attached". The banks hoped those strings wouldn't be enforced, but that hasn't been the case(thankfully). A lot of banks have opted to pay the money back. I sincerely doubt this would have been the case if they had just been given a blank check.
The automakers are just F***** and have been for a long time. Their bailout was to soften the blow of all of them going down in close proximity, and at a time when there was no faith in the economy. Maybe it wasn't needed, maybe it prevented a lot of suffering. I'll wait until we're on the other side of this recession to see what the effects were.
Also I love how you say "There is a huge difference between anti-trust action, and State take-over of a company" in your first sentence and then equate the two in your last.
Was that due to competition or what the unions did which drove costs up for the US steel plants?
Or maybe Intel just has a really awesome marketing department. Seriously, have you ever heard of 'AMD Inside?' I heard stories of executives in the 90s who would say things like, "I don't know what that Intel stuff is, but I want some of it in my computer." I'm not sure if what Intel did market manipulative things or not, but they definitely rocked AMD on the marketing front.
Qxe4
No one said the government was taking over Intel and don't you have a town hall meeting to attend to proclaim Obama an illegal immigrant or something?
AMD got a bad rap at a time because their processors did not have an integrated temperature measurement diode like the PIII did. This meant if a processor was inadequately cooled you could get a burn out processor. They fixed that in Palomino (Athlon XP). Still, compared to the hardware bugs in the i820 chipset, or the paper launch of the 1GHz PIII, it was no biggie.
something like this:
the PC manufacturer had to ship intel-based systems because there was some significant portion of consumers that recognize the intel brand name ... despite the fact that intel-based CPUs were inferior to AMD at the time. that's called anti-competitive practices ... for the obvious reason that AMD wasn't being allowed to compete based on price / technical / marketing merits.
would intel have technical superiority over AMD right now if the playing field was level during the 90's-00's? good question.