N.Y. AG Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Intel 169
CWmike writes "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against microprocessor maker Intel, alleging that the company engaged in a 'systematic campaign' of illegal conduct to protect a monopoly. Cuomo's lawsuit alleges that Intel extracted exclusive agreements from large computer makers and threatened to punish those perceived to be working too closely with Intel competitors. Intel gave computer makers payments totaling billions of dollars in exchange for the exclusive agreements, and the company threatened to cut off payments to computer makers or fund their competitors when they worked with other microprocessor makers, the lawsuit alleged. Cuomo's lawsuit comes less than two weeks after news reports that the FTC is considering filing a formal complaint against Intel. 'Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market,' Cuomo said in a statement. 'Intel's actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitors, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices. These illegal tactics must stop and competition must be restored to this vital marketplace.'"
It's the new fad (Score:5, Insightful)
Find/Replace (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Adobe (Score:3, Insightful)
You must not use much of their portfolio professionally to say that. The free replacements are quite non-functional for anything but most basic tasks.
On the other hand, there are lots of commercial offerings that compete well with Adobe's products. Other than Photoshop and Acrobat, all of their other heavyweights (Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, Dreamweaver, etc.) have significant competitors. I'm not really sure why they should be considered a big bad monopoly.
Re:Govt Seizure of Private Business (Score:3, Insightful)
As a leftard, I WISH! Seriously, you teabaggers need to stop prickteasing me with all this socialism that's supposed to happen, but doesn't.
Re:SpitzerSwallows? (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, isn't doing good things so that you can get reelected SUPPOSED to be the way things should work?
Re:I'll scratch your back.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yawn. (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess the point here is that even though Opteron was kicking ass, AMD couldn't get past 25% or so marketshare, thanks to what Intel was doing to preserve its monopoly. It's hard to compete when your competitor can give Dell a billion dollars to stop them from buying any AMD.. (or threaten "jihad"!)
If AMD was fairly allowed to sell the products they made a few years back, they might have had the resources to keep their fabs and fund research into next gen CPUs.
NO Govt Seizure of Private Business (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Adobe (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming Adobe has a monopoly in some area or other, precisely how have they abused it?
The illegal part is the abuse/protection, not the monopoly itself.
Re:Govt Seizure of Private Business (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it strike you as ironic? (Score:2, Insightful)
Does it strike anybody else as a bit ironic to have Intel being sued for a market segmet defined by Intel?
There are loads os chips out there tat can easily be made into a GP computer - ARM, MIPS, SPARC, and Cell, to name a few. It's Intel that defines 'x86' and they are being sued in tat 'market'.
I'm not saying this suit isn't a good idea. Just seems a bit ironic...
Oversight with no understanding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oversight with no understanding? (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. Without knowing SOMETHING about the business of the company about the best they can hope to do is walk around slapping people on the asses and saying "Keep up the profits n' shit!".
That and making background deals with company to "buy our stuff". They probably don't even know what stuff they're selling, just that they want people to buy it.
Re:Maybe Intel needs a new CEO and Board. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Their job is to look out for the interests of the stockholder."
But the job they really do is to look out for the interests of board members in general (e.g. if you give me big bucks for being CEO then I'll give you big bucks for being CEO through my buddy who sits on your board of directors).
Re:Govt Seizure of Private Business (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you even paying attention to what we're talking about?
Turning your brain off doesn't make problems go away. We're talking about ISPs with government-granted monopolies supported by the restriction against the creation of competition.
Re:Breaking the law is okay with you? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because corporate officers treat the law as a business expense and if it's cheaper to ignore it and pay any penalties they may incur then that's what they do. Microsoft are a classic example of that (sorry shills but it's true). That means there's more money for the stockholders (which includes the aforementioned corporate officers).
Fab Capacity (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that people are either forgetting or ignoring this point:
AMD doesn't and didn't have the fab capabilities to take the market overnight. It would take a long time to start eating away the market share that Intel has. The amount of fab capacity that Intel has is enormous. They could stockpile months of chips if they wanted. AMD was selling chips as soon as they came off the production line.
AMD could not have gone to Dell and said "I'll supply all of your x86 chips cheaper than Intel, buy mine instead" if they wanted to. They wouldn't have been able to keep up with the demand.
Re:Maybe Intel needs a new CEO and Board. (Score:5, Insightful)
(e.g. if you give me big bucks for being CEO then I'll give you big bucks for being CEO through my buddy who sits on your board of directors)
If it's even that indirect as to have to be "a buddy" rather than the CEO in question themselves.
My company's last CEO was, in addition to being Chairman of the Board of the company he headed, also on the Boards of two other companies.
It's a big incestuous network. When would the board ever not vote to increase executive compensation, or to create actual incentives not to run companies into the ground? Golden parachutes and ever-increasing bonuses (always to "maintain competitive with industry standards" that they created) are a direct result of this inbreeding.
Re:I'll scratch your back.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll agree with you on the shady practices of Intel when the Athlon line was launched - but I don't think a one hit wonder like that should magically position AMD as the top chip maker.
let's look at some realities. AMD's 386 and 486 beat the pants off their intel equivalents and the 586 was fairly competitive with the pentium. The K6 is a far superior chip to the P2 but it's a crap 386, but because of intel's hold nobody put effort into supporting K2 and it flopped; by the time the K6/3 came out with real x86 compatibility (think FPU) it was too late.
Meanwhile, from the point the Athlon came out until the time the Core 2 Duo got its first price drop, AMD has had a clear technology lead over Intel no matter how you measure it. What happened? AMD has been executing like crazy. I can't believe they just failed, sorry.