European Commission issues antitrust charges against Intel
By Darren Murph 
posted Jul 26th 2007 5:47PM
posted Jul 26th 2007 5:47PM
Well they've been sniffing around the chip giant for quite some time now, but the European Commission has finally issued "formal charges against Intel for allegedly using illegal tactics against smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices," and according to a spokesperson for the EC, "the statement of objections has been sent." Supposedly, the EU's top antitrust regulator "has spent years investigating Intel's tactics to determine whether it acted unfairly to preserve its dominance over AMD," and now the time has finally come for the hammer to drop. Sadly, further details about the grievances have yet to be divulged, but we doubt Intel, who declined to comment on the situation, will be brushing this off its shoulders anytime soon.
It would almost be funny if all Intel devices were blackballed from Europe. There would be riots. Think of all the devices that have Intel chips. They did it to other companies that broke their "rules." It won't happen, but it would be fun to watch.
Why is it rules in quotation marks? When large corporations break the "rules" it generally hurts the consumer, other business competitors and the market in general. If Intel are guilty of any wrongdoing then they should be punished appropriately. I think the EU is generally more protective when it comes to these kind of issues than North America but if the Govt or in this case the beurocrats in Europe arent watching out then who is?
@ MarkLB
THE MARKET
The consumer doesn't need socialist EUs to regulate businesses.
Globalization has brought a massive cluster screw of legal compliance issues as businesses try to sell all over the world. Anti-trust laws are notoriously judgmental. It isn't like a speeding violation. There is a lot of interpretation. So, big deal, one of a thousand different regulatory bodies Intel has to worry about files formal charges. They'll live.
These are both American companies traded on American exchanges. Someone should tell this "top anti-trust regulator" to mind his own friggin' business. Maybe the European Commission should fine companies that manufacture in China because they don't meet the EU minimum wage.
@ LintSniffer
Yes, the market. But if one company is carrying out business practices that are essentially illegal then they must be punished. If Intel and AMD for that matter wish to sell in Europe then they should abide by the rules and regulations that are enforced there.
By your argument we should all be grateful that the market allowed microsoft to dominate the desktop market - because thats worked out so well for us all.
Also, what's socialism got to do with this? Not very much really.
I am a AMD fan, and i know lately they haven't been doing so well against the Core2Duo. Sometimes i feel was it completely Intel's entire fault? rarely did i see AMD advertise on commercials. So it's kinda hard for me to judge why AMD was only stuck at second. And again you can argue that Intel pretty much gave discounts to manufactures that exclusively carried Intel only CPUs. So, as I am writing I now see how it all plays. If AMD was to advertise, they wouldn't be able to keep the low prices to compete and change manufactures minds to go with them because of there price/performance ratio. So Intel had the upper hand in mass marketing and more exclusive rights, and the ability to have lower cost per waffer. If AMD was to do little advertise to keep the cost down then they wouldn't be able to gain ground to change manufactures minds about going with AMD.
Sounds right people?
I gotta agree with you, AMD's marketing is too subtle and does go far enough.
At least people are starting to learn what AMD's place in the market is.
The European Commission confirmed that it has sent a Statement of Objections (SO) to Intel on 26th July 2007. The SO outlines the Commission’s preliminary view that Intel has infringed the EC Treaty rules on abuse of a dominant position (Article 82) with the aim of excluding its main rival, AMD, from the x86 Computer Processing Units (CPU) market. In the SO, the Commission outlines its preliminary conclusion that Intel has engaged in three types of abuse of a dominant market position. First, Intel has provided substantial rebates to various Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) conditional on them obtaining all or the great majority of their CPU requirements from Intel. Secondly, in a number of instances, Intel made payments in order to induce an OEM to either delay or cancel the launch of a product line incorporating an AMD-based CPU. Thirdly, in the context of bids against AMD-based products for strategic customers in the server segment of the market, Intel has offered CPUs on average below cost. These three types of conduct are aimed at excluding AMD, Intel's main rival, from the market. Each of them is provisionally considered to constitute an abuse of a dominant position in its own right. However, the Commission also considers at this stage of its analysis that the three types of conduct reinforce each other and are part of a single overall anti-competitive strategy. Intel has until October 8th to reply though may seek an extension to this, and will then have the right to be heard in an Oral Hearing. If the preliminary views expressed in the SO are confirmed, the Commission may require Intel to cease the abuse and may impose a fine of up to 10% of Intel’s world wide turnover last year!
The Europeans trying to police our corporations is like a civilian trying to make a citizen's arrest. Someone should tell them to back off...
Well, if your corporations want to do business on a 2+ times bigger not to mention a richer market than the US (yes, we don’t actually pay for a lot of the stuff you do, like health or education say, which kinda leaves more money to buy stuff), they should respect our regulations, no one is forcing them to do business here. As for your claims of the Europeans being amateurs or unaware of how a corporation works better or not , well, you obviously are not aware of some very big corporations here , how about : Nokia , Philips , Ericsson , Sap , Alcatel , Thomson , Logitech , Adidas , Puma , Siemens just to name a few without even including the car companies. Are those companies big because the Europeans don’t know anything about the global market ? Please, take your anti European issues elsewhere.
Oh you little miserable thing, if it is made available to me by a company, why should I not buy it ? the company is not doing me a favor, i pay for it and someone better make sure that its all done as fair as possible and that’s what the regulations do. I find you f*g comments as pathetic as you, this is where people turn to when they lack any real argument just to make some noise. We Europeans had to unite to stand a chance against you ? was there a war somewhere that I cant remember, or is it just that by us you mean a global corporation that makes money, not out of 300 million people, but by the rest of the billions out there ? Are the American companies into charity and they wanna do us poor people a favor ? Or is it maybe that you cant stand how your own country does not support you as a person and your well being in almost any way and now that someone does and its not you “the leaders of the free world” (as if) you cant stand it ? Get a life and stop thinking that this world owns you a favor.
Symbix:
If you don't pay for health care or education, who does? There's no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody always pays -directly, or indirectly. How much is a gallon of gas in Europe? How high are your income taxes?
gee i don't know if you guys have been keeping tabs on the tech race, but truth and point is intel's c2d has been beating amd's chips at pretty much everything. marketing or not, amd's still on the short end of the stick no matter how you look at it.
Exactly. There are some cases where these charges are warranted, but in this case, Intel is clearly the leader when it comes to many of their processors (i dont think as much in the server space, but i dont follow that too much. I think opteron wins on a performance per watt rating, im not sure). So now, Europe is penalizing a clearly superior company. Its not the fault of Intel that AMD didnt see the C2D or the new Xeons coming, decided to invest a substantial amount of money on AMD, have nothing prepared for the release of C2D to counter it, not have a proper quad core system until Phenom, spend money on developing the 4x4 which was an absolute disaster, not see ATI coming out with a product that only either competes or loses to a product that is 6 months old with the x2900, etc. etc.
Im sure those arnt the only reasons AMD is getting hurt, but to us consumers, they have clearly made many mistakes, and there is absolutely no reason that anyone should be angry at Intel. They are the performance leaders, and it is quite possible that AMD will rebound. But if this kind of action is required just to keep a company competitive in the market, then quite frankly i dont want anything from a loser company.
EU worried aboutthe ate of those AMD fabs in Germany should more worry about the potetial for AMD to go fabless.
"decided to invest a substantial amount of money on AMD" should read "buying ATI". Sorry
this complaint from EC has to do with a charge AMD made several years ago that was proven true: intel threatened to not sell any chips to companies that used any AMD chips. AMD found out because Toshiba and a few other companies told them about it. this happened right after AMD came out with their ,at the time, superior 64 bit chips and intel wanted to stay on top, so they cheated. its not illegal to do that if there is three or more companies in the market and its just to get a little bigger market share but AMD is the only competitor. so intels actions suddenly become illegal because its forcing a monopoly on the chip market in a dishonest way
Thanks for the summary Marvric33 - I have no problem with Intel but what they did was essentially to try and operate as a monopoly - to dominate the market not through superior products but through market and economic influence. Everyone is entitled to an opinion but I just dont understand how anyone can consider that a fair business practice.
No worries though, life goes on ;)
In before Europe bashing.
Oh wait...
I think Intel isnt the one to blame for AMD's failure, they had the same chance of comming with something usefull but they didnt even when they were comming from a successfull Atlhon vs Pentium 4 competition with the 64-bit implementation, in-die memory controller, a wonderfull set of chipsets (nvidia mostly). On the other side Intel was getting weaker with the netburst "curse", prescott underperformance, but they kept working without complains (i have never seen Intel directing charges against AMD) and it paid. the israli team came up with the "core" architecture that benefited us. So i dont see why developing does anything bad to the cosumer or the market.
This is like F1 where FIA keep blaming Ferrari of having an advantage over others because they develop better engines than the others.
In real life this is called being "lame", the EC should tell AMD to put themselves together and get to work.
(ATI was doing just great until AMD took over BTW)