Sources Say EU Will Find Intel Anti-Competitive 210
Anarchduke sends in a Reuters story quoting unnamed sources who say that the European Union has decided to find Intel anti-competitive. The finding should be announced in the coming week. "...the Commission will say Intel paid PC makers to delay or scrap the launch of products containing AMD chips. The Commission will characterize the payments as 'naked restrictions' to competition, the sources said. ... Intel set percentages of its own chips that it wanted PC makers to use, the sources said. For example, NEC Corp was told that 20 percent of its desktop and notebook machines could have AMD chips, the sources said. All Lenovo notebooks had to use Intel chips, as did relevant Dell products. The figure was 95 percent for Hewlett-Packard's business desktops, they said." Previous infractions by Intel include giving illegal rebates to computer makers back in 2007 and paying retailers not to sell AMD-based computer systems.
Skype (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what else they've been up to?
Re:Tell me who actually pays? (Score:5, Informative)
A better solution than taking money, banning their product for a set time.
No, that would be punishing EU member states at least as much Intel. Have you looked at the market for servers lately? Desktops? Laptops? Intel is subject to anti-competition laws because it has a dominant market position. If you were to suddenly cut their products out of the market, that would hurt every manufacturer of IT equipment and every business that uses said equipment. That is a great way to hurt the EU's ability to perform in the world market.
The reason a fine is useful is precisely because the costs are passed on to Intel customers worldwide, not just in the EU. This means that it really is Intel that is paying for its behavior on a global scale.
Re:EU is EU Centric (Score:5, Informative)
In case you need examples:
Saint-Gobain ( 900m euro)
ThyssenKrupp ( 500m)
Hoffmna-La Roche ( 500m)
Siemens ( 400m)
Pilkington ( 400m)
BASF ( 300m)
Otis ( 300m)
Re:EU is EU Centric (Score:5, Informative)
You mean EU firms such as Lufthansa [europa.eu], Daimler [europa.eu], Deutsche Bank [europa.eu], Viag Interkom GmbH [europa.eu], Telefonica S.A. [europa.eu], KONE GmbH [europa.eu], those kinds of firms?
Re:EU needs more money (Score:5, Informative)
From what I remember, the commission can impose fines up to 10% of annual turnover, which for a company like Intel is a funny sum of money.
Re:EU needs more money (Score:5, Informative)
3) The company is American
See this
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1228499&cid=27904971 [slashdot.org]
and this
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1228499&cid=27904903 [slashdot.org]
for EU companies fined
And get over your 'EU hates US' paranoia
Wow, after 9 years justice finally catches up (Score:5, Informative)
Duh.
Intel have been anti-competitive since end of the nineteens. Once AMD vas viable as alternative, suddenly you couldn't buy AMD supported motherboards anymore, let's not talk about systems. Actually Intel did bad for their distributors, because disallowing to sell AMD it allowed to do it their new competitors - in result new branch of distributors grow up with AMD-only stuff (reselling Intel only when it was really needed).
Intel dealership tactics have been ugly all the time. Even now, OLPC got burned from them few years ago.
Re:EU is EU Centric (Score:5, Informative)
Ireland - GP visit: 60, prescription drugs - cutoff is 130 per month, per household, Accident and Emergency visit - 90 unless referred by a GP, public hospital outpatient visits - 90 charge. Waiting lists for public outpatient procedures can be the better part of a year (private patients are treated in public hospitals and get priority).
Some of us haven't experienced enough EU influence.
People earning 30,000 or even more might be paying no income tax, and yet are "poor" due to having to pay through the nose directly for everything.
Re:EU needs more money (Score:5, Informative)
You get a 1.5 out of 3. The first item is likely true, in part because smaller cases are probably either handled at the national level (do not need to involve the EU) or perhaps such cases exist but do not get the same media coverage. But OK, I'll give you that one.
As to item 3: the EU also regularly heavily fines large European companies. For example, Siemens got fined for 400 million euro [spiegel.de] for forming a price cartel. Also see here [rawstory.com]: "The total fines slapped on 11 companies based in the EU and Japan amount to some 750.7 million euros. [..] The total penalty for the cartel is the second-highest imposed by the commission [as of 2007], following a record 790.5 million euros for fixing vitamin prices in 2001".
Oh, and before you ask, that vitamin cartel involved Hoffman-La Roche of Switzerland, which got fined 462m euros, and BASF of Germany, which got fined to the tune of 296m.
As to 2: the company doesn't have to be a monopoly either, although such fines do indeed commonly concern oligopolies (since forming cartels is a very lucrative prospect in such an environment, for obvious reasons). See above examples. Because of such cartels you could perhaps call this "essentially a monopoly", so ok, half point there.
I'd have assumed you where just trolling, but since you are getting upmodded and I've seen such sentiments in other discussions as well, I thought I'd point this out.
Re:EU is EU Centric (Score:3, Informative)
And the free market works even here. Here in Belgium you can choose between the Christelijke Mutualiteit, Bond Moyson and the neutral health care insurance.
US to strengthen anti-trust enforcement also (Score:5, Informative)
NY Times [nytimes.com] "WASHINGTON â" President Obamaâ(TM)s top antitrust official this week plans to restore an aggressive enforcement policy against corporations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or to keep them from gaining market share."
"The new enforcement policy would reverse the Bush administrationâ(TM)s approach, which strongly favored defendants against antitrust claims. It would restore a policy that led to the landmark antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft and Intel in the 1990s."
Re:EU needs more money (Score:3, Informative)
A good example of a case covering both points you make was the BA/Virgin price-fixing case [wikipedia.org], handled by the Office of Fair Trading here in the UK instead of by the EU. It wasn't monopoly that caused the problem, but oligopolist price fixing.
The US DoJ got a look in on that one for obvious reasons.
Re:*SNIFF* They're finally growing up! (Score:4, Informative)
Windows NT ran fine on Alpha. The problem was that NT was not very well known, and with Alpha being even more rare, there was no applications written for Windows NT Alpha. For a moment Alpha processors was so much faster than Intel processors that they could successfully run simulations of x86 processors faster than the fastest x86 processors. This x86->Alpha translation software is the granddaddy of many modern JIT compilers.
When Intel starting doing hardware simulations of x86 in the Pentium Pro architectures, they finally beat the Alpha on price and performance (thought first in P2). The Alpha guys managed to beat Intel on last time though when they jumped ship help design the Athlon for AMD.
Re:EU needs more money (Score:1, Informative)
A free market is a really nice way for optimal results from use of infinite resources by infinite competing entities. Too bad reality intrudes with things like not being infinite.
The specific problem here is that semiconductor fabrication plants are bloody expensive, so the amount of entities that can afford one will not allow for even a reasonable approximation of a free market.
Re:EU is EU Centric (Score:3, Informative)
Re:EU needs more money (Score:3, Informative)
Read "Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith. You are referring the later capitalists which re-interpreted free market to require "hands off" by the government. What that meant was that the government should not help to create monopolies or distort the market. It has nothing to do with keeping the playing field level.