EU Issues Largest Antitrust Fine to Date for CRT TV Price Fixing

hankwang writes "The European commission fined a number manufacturers for pricing fixing of cathode ray tubes in the period between 1996 and 2005. The total fine was EUR 1.47 billion (USD 1.92 billion), for Philips, LG Electronics, Samsung SDI, and three other firms. According to the European Commission: 'For almost 10 years, the cartelists carried out the most harmful anti-competitive practices including price fixing, market sharing, customer allocation, capacity and output coordination and exchanges of commercial sensitive information. The cartelists also monitored the implementation, including auditing compliance with the capacity restrictions by plant visits in the case of the computer monitor tubes cartel.'"

Comments

And now what?

[ranulf]

How does this actually help someone who's bought a TV or monitor during this time? Most people probably won't have the receipts for these TVs or monitors now, and in many cases have probably already thrown them out or given them away to make room for an LCD replacement...

Re:People still buy tube TVs?

[afidel]

And most of these same companies are in fact implicated in LCD price fixing.

Why!?

[EzInKy]

What would it take for us Americans to get a government that favors individuals over corporations? Perhaps a new
Supreme Court? The current one seems to think that corporations are people.

Re:Why!?

[MightyYar]

I want the New York Times, the media corporation, to have free speech. Granting the Times free speech and not more politically-motivated corporations free speech is a very difficult problem to solve. I can't really fault the Supreme Court.

I think we need to re-examine what we want corporations to be, in a more general sense. There should be a huge amount of support for reform, but for some reason there is not. On the left, people love to hate corporations. On the right, the more libertarian-leaning folks should hate corporations since they represent a huge example of government interference in the free market, and they mask individual liability.

And who will pay the fines?

[SuperCharlie]

The consumer will pay the fines in higher prices. Take the boards and the CEOs responsible to jail if you want to make a dent in this, all the fines will do is tack on a fine tax to their products. Thanks.

Re:People still buy tube TVs?

[erroneus]

On one hand, the suits associated with the behaviors past, should happen. They caused damage to consumers and to product makers. But at the same time, it somehow feels like various parties are scraping for extra cash and are seeking what I would consider to be 'last resort' means and methods to get it.

It feels like someone within the upper tiers of the economy know something the rest of us don't (and that would be an economic collapse never seen before in human history) or that this is business as usual and I just never noticed it to this degree before.

I recall the tremors I felt just prior to the most recent collapse. Banks were scrambling for fees and things... charging for every little thing that might be considered a service or courtesy. They knew what was coming and all the signs I saw made perfect sense once things became public. Fortunately, my brother saw it too and shifted his 401K to bonds and stuff like that so he didn't lose out at all.

I see all these legal suits over technology as the precursor to something bigger, hairier and darker. Just not quite sure what it is just yet, but it will achieve some critical mass at some point in the near future I think. The current level of activity is certainly not sustainable.