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EU Intel The Almighty Buck The Courts Technology

Intel's $1.3 Billion Fine In Europe Requires Review, Court Says (nytimes.com) 72

Posted by BeauHD from the second-look dept.
cdreimer writes: According to a report in The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), the Court of Justice in the European Union has ordered the lower courts to revisit the $1.3 billion anti-trust fine levied against Intel in 2009, giving hope to Google and other American technology firms to avoid being fined for being dominant in the EU markets. From the report: "The highest court in the European Union ordered on Wednesday that a $1.3 billion antitrust fine doled out against Intel nearly a decade ago be revisited, a ruling that could give hope to Google and other American technology giants facing challenges to their dominance in the region. The decision to send the case back to a lower court for re-examination is a blow to regional competition regulators, whose oversight of digital services has been among the world's most aggressive. It could also embolden American technology companies, which have long complained that antitrust officials in Europe target them unfairly, to challenge rulings and investigations against them. The move by the Court of Justice of the European Union raises the prospect that the 1.06 billion euro fine on Intel in 2009, equivalent to $1.26 billion at current exchange rates, could be reduced or scrapped entirely. The penalty -- at the time the largest of its kind -- was upheld by European courts in 2014 and will most likely be the subject of legal battles for years to come. That record fine was overtaken by a 2.4 billion euro penalty against Google in June. The Silicon Valley giant was accused of using its dominant position in online search to give preferential treatment to its internet shopping service over those of its rivals."
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Intel's $1.3 Billion Fine In Europe Requires Review, Court Says More

Intel's $1.3 Billion Fine In Europe Requires Review, Court Says

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  • Fines (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 )

    Will the fine have any impact on the market shares of any of the CPU manufacturers? Nope. Whom gets the money from the fine? AMD? Nope. ARM? Nope. Any other CPU maker - Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Atmel, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, IBM, Freescale? Nope. Any company who has been directly affected by their anti-competitive practices? Nope.

    The EU gets all the money. Well that fixes everything, then. Good job, EU.

    • The EU gets all the money. Well that fixes everything, then. Good job, EU.

      The Germans are getting even for WW2.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hord ( 5016115 )

        The Germans are getting even for everyone else getting even for WW2 (and WW1).

    • One word: deterrent.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by 4im ( 181450 )

      Indeed, those fines, punishing those misbehaving, go straight
      into the EU budget.

      Benefitting everybody, instead of only the lawyers.

      That's indeed the european way.

      Intel - who's misbehavior is not in doubt - will still get
      punished, the question is about a rather small detail
      and will only weigh on the lump sum to be paid.

    • It was the EUs market which was damaged by the actions of the company, why should anyone else get the money?

      • It was the EUs market which was damaged by the actions of the company, why should anyone else get the money?

        What? That sort of thing might sound like it makes sense until you consider who makes up the market. When you say a market was damaged, what does that actually mean? Consumers pay higher prices, yes, but more important is the impact to the employees of competitors. Of course, just handing the money to the competitors won't help those people either; most of it will just end up as executive bonuses.

        • Well AMD had a factory in Dresden, Saxony, Germany, which manufactured CPUs. In fact had Intel not screwed them over perhaps they would still own the plant instead of spinning it off as Globalfoundries.

        • The market is akin to the free public pool - the swimmers both the consumers and the vendors.

          When a vendor takes a shit in the deep end and the pool has to be cleaned, its the vendor who is going to be paying the fine for doing so, and its the public pool owners who are going to be receiving the money.

          The other vendors are free to pursue their own actions against the naughty vendor.

          Its all very abstract - at the end of the day, its the EU and its member countries which create and manage the environment in w

      • Market (Score:2)

        by JBMcB ( 73720 )

        It was the EUs market which was damaged by the actions of the company, why should anyone else get the money?

        You could make an argument that the EU was indirectly affected by Intel's practices, as it did restrict competition but it didn't make it impossible to buy computers with AMD chips. They were available, just less available than Intel systems. At worst, it was inconvenient to buy an AMD based system.

        AMD was DIRECTLY affected by this practice. Not being able to sell their chips to a few major computer manufacturers directly impacted their market share.

        So if you measured the impact, in my opinion, the customer

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

          Now, if you are talking about a billion dollars in damages, that sounds like the effects of AMD's loss of market share. So why isn't AMD getting any of the money?

          Because AMD didn't sue Intel for violations of competition law in the reported action.

          You act as if there can only be one suit against Intel for their behavior. But a governmental authority can file suit against Intel on behalf of itself as the soverign authority, a competitor can file suit against Intel on behalf of itself, and, on occasion, a ci

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by JBMcB ( 73720 )

            But a governmental authority can file suit against Intel on behalf of itself as the soverign authority, a competitor can file suit against Intel on behalf of itself, and, on occasion, a citizen or group of citizens can file suit against Intel for their own injuries (not a European attorney, no idea whether they provide for consumer actions).

            I understand all of that. My issue is that the damages awarded seems to be in line with the effects on AMD, not the average European consumer. Do you think the EU, as a whole, experienced over a billion dollars worth of economic damage because you couldn't buy specific brands of computers with an AMD processor? The EU didn't even miss out on tax revenue, they collect taxes on systems whether they have AMD or Intel chips.

            So even a hundred million dollar fine I could see. A billion? That's insane.

            • The effect on AMD was much larger than a $billion. AMD even had to spin off its fabs to stay afloat.

              The fine should have been enough to almost destroy Intel, just as Intels actions were almost enough to destroy AMD.

            • If you compare Intel's prices while they had competition and while they didn't, CPU prices easily went double because of it. AMD had their main CPU factories in Dresden, Germany, so yes it did impact the EU directly when Intel managed to reduce AMD's sales with uncompetitive practices.

          • Oh AMD did sue Intel alright. It's just that the lawsuit was settled out of court for a huge payment by Intel (Intel to pay AMD $1.25 billion in antitrust settlement [cnet.com]).

    • Re:Fines (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xest ( 935314 ) on Thursday September 07, 2017 @02:41AM (#55151925)

      And what do you think the EU does with the money? EU politicians don't even get remotely the income of US politicians so it's not like they're just making themselves rich off of grants like this.

      EU funding goes to various projects, many are science and technology projects, and ARM has in fact successfully bid for EU research funding in the past.

      So yes, good job EU. You fined a predatory company willing to abuse it's illegally obtained market position sufficiently well enough to have a deterrent effect whilst also obtaining funds from the damage caused that could go on to help stimulate further competition in the market.

      This can't even be billed as an anti-US action as the summary suggests because the complaint was by and ruled in favour of another US company - AMD. This was a good example of the EU ruling impartially that market laws apply on EU territory, and that companies cannot get away with the monopoly abuse and illegal trading practices they have been allowed to get away with in the US. This complaint was about two US companies operating on EU soil, one of whom was deemed to be operating illegaly, resulting in a favourable ruling for the other US company operating in the EU.

      Hopefully this is not just upheld, but the fine increased to send a message to Intel that it should be grateful it got to keep it's monopoly position for a mere $1bn the first time around - still a relatively small price to pay for illegally obtained dominance in the grand scheme of things.

      • EU politicians don't even get remotely the income of US politicians so it's not like they're just making themselves rich off of grants like this.

        So, how are they enriching themselves? It's got to be another way, then. We know for a fact they are, all we have to do is investigate. How many EU politicians have been put in jail by investigative journalists recently? Are European mainstream media spending resources to uncover EU corruption? If not, how is anyone ever going to find out about it?

    • If by your facetious comment you think that a 30% hit on the bottom line is just waved away and doesn't have an effect on the company or a market then you're a complete moron.

      Intel's net profit was $4.3bn the year of the fine.

      Yeah actually good job EU. At least some government knows how to issue a fine that is relevant.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EMN13 ( 11493 )

      If you think EU fines have dubious beneficiaries (not unjustifiably so), consider that due to the existence of punitive damages in the US, the US fines far more heavily overall. E.g. banks have been fined 321 billion (!) dollars; mostly by the US due to the financial shenanigans in the crash (see e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]). Similarly, VW is likely to pay a lot more in fines than a US firm would in the EU. (Not that it's weird for VW to be fined so heavily, it's just that the law isn't symmetric

  • Bullshit biased article (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    giving hope to Google and other American technology firms to avoid being fined for being dominant in the EU markets.

    Wong, just completely wrong. The fine was for illegal practices and abusing its dominant market position.

    It could also embolden American technology companies, which have long complained that antitrust officials in Europe target them unfairly,

    Yes its so unfair that bribery and donations to politicians doesn't work as well as in the US.

  • Let's recall how their treatment in the EU compares to the US: In the EU they have judicial process which merely threatens to impose fines if they continue with business as normal. In the US they were forced by government with no judicial process to licence IP to enable competitor AMD. Intel is free to cast it's IP to the wind to enable real competitive market. They no doubt prefer fines to doing that, though.

    I don't see why Google giving out it's tech isn't a viable option. If anything their search is b

    • They no doubt prefer fines to doing that, though.

      The fine in this case was around 25% of the profit they made that year. Anyone would rather take the IP licensing deal than hand over that kind of money.

  • Meta comment (Score:3, Insightful)

    by easyTree ( 1042254 ) on Thursday September 07, 2017 @12:42AM (#55151679)

    I notice a trend of the summary stating ' the source may be pay-walled, here's an alternate source'. Why not simply skip the pay-walled source?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cdreimer ( 4977441 )
      The paywalled article was quoted in the summary. The alternative source may not have been available at submission and added later by the editor. Sometimes the alternative source is completely different (i.e., a summary about the paywalled article), or identical with sister publications like The Wall Street Journal (paywalled) and Fox News (non-paywalled) sharing content.

      • Ok. Thanks for the heads-up :D

        Follow-up question, what is the value to the readers of an information-sharing site in posting links to sites which restrict the viewing of 'their' information to the small subset who'll pay?

        Are we soon to have news in Latin to further refine the readership?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          It is of value to those who do have the necessary subscription to get past the paywall. That is assuming there is extra information in the paywalled version.

          If an article was originally posted in Latin, or any other language than English, it would also be appropriate to include that link for those who can read it. Plus a link to a translated version.

          It is about including all relevant information, even if not everyone can make use of it. Should an article referencing a highly technical scientific paper, not

          • It is about including all relevant information, even if not everyone can make use of it. Should an article referencing a highly technical scientific paper, not also have a link to that paper, even if it is freely available, just because only a subset of readers will be able to understand it?

            I have no figures on the proportion of users having access to particular pay-walled sites. Might one reasonably assume that for each it would be less than 50% ? If so, I would consider the pay-walled article a poor choic

  • "being fined for being dominant in the EU markets" (Score:3)

    by citizenr ( 871508 ) on Thursday September 07, 2017 @05:21AM (#55152205) Homepage

    Is author of this garbage news post retarded? or being paid by Intel?

    Intel was fined for DIRECTLY BRIBING computer manufacturers/resellers in exchange for not selling AMD parts.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by afidel ( 530433 )

      Google literally followed the guidance set by the Microsoft settlement and allowed the user choice in setting things like search provider in Android and yet they got hit with a huge fine, kinda hard to avoid massive fines when you follow the guidance set the last time the issue came up and still get hit.

  • Someone is enjoying their new house and pension fund. With Intel inside!

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