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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...
Actually, anti-trust issues are exactly the sort of thing that needs to be handled by the government because no one else is in a position to do so. There are many good reasons for anti-trust issues: 1) large controling companies in industries can hurt customers, stifle competition and stifle innovation. 2) They make industries and the economy as a whole more vulnerable to sudden fluctuations (look what happened in the banking industry. That was in part because the largest banks were too large. Unfortunately, we haven't really dealt with that part of the problem...). The FTC doesn't need to know how to run a business. They just need to know how to identify anti-competitive practices.
I could have sworn that at one time, the Athlon was king of the world, then the Core 2 Duo's came out and Intel was king of the world since because AMD hasn't made a superior CPU.
Is Intel supposed to purposefully degrade the quality of their product? What is it that they did that has the FTC crying foul?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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.
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?