Posted 11/12/09 at 09:31:08 AM by Paul Lilly

Talk about vindication. AMD waited a long time for this day and took a lot of heat from the Intel faithful, but the chip maker finally got it was looking for: a huge settlement.

Finally putting to rest the longstanding antitrust dispute, Intel and AMD announced today a settlement agreement in which Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion, as well as agree to "abide by a set of business practice provisions." In return, AMD will drop all pending litigation and withdraw all of its regulatory complaints worldwide.

"While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development," the chip makers said in a joint statement.

The dispute dates back to 2004 when AMD filed a case accusing Intel of unfair business practices that entailed snuffing the smaller chip maker out. Intel allegedly offered sizable rebates to key vendors in exchange for either dealing exclusively with Intel, or delaying the launch of AMD products.

While AMD has agreed to take its money and run, Intel might not be out of hot water completely. The settlement doesn't prevent governments from initiating antitrust cases against Intel.

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Posted 11/06/09 at 08:04:55 AM by Paul Lilly

During an interview with the Fox Business Network, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said his company has learned from Microsoft's past follies in terms of antitrust issues and letting the competition catch up.

"Hopefully we won't repeat the mistakes that Microsoft made 10 years ago that ultimately led to all these things that happened to them," Schmidt said.

Schmidt was also pressed on the potential for Twitter and Facebook to steal the thunder from Google among younger Internet users. But according to Schmidt, it's not a big concern because users of social networking services end up using Google even more.

You can view the two-part interview here and here.

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Posted 11/04/09 at 12:45:15 PM by Paul Lilly

It seems like everywhere Intel turns it's being sued over alleged antitrust violations. The latest lawsuit comes from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who claims Intel threatened computer makers and made a series of illegal payments to coerce them into using its chips. In other words, the same accusations AMD has been harping about for a good many years now.

"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 competitor, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices."

Intel has faced similar lawsuits earlier in the year, and in May, the European Commission hammered Intel with a record $1.45 billion fine for antitrust violations. Intel is currently appealing the ruling.

The latest lawsuit is significant because it's the first formal antitrust action against Intel by any government agency in the U.S. in more than a decade, the New York Times reports. Intel has been under investigation by the FTC since 2008, but that hasn't led to any formal proceedings.

"These are separate investigations, but it would be very surprising for New York Sate to go off on its own without being fairly confident the FTC would pursue Intel as well," a person familiar with the state's investigation told NYT.

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Posted 10/28/09 at 02:40:16 PM by Paul Lilly

Sony isn't the only one in hot water with U.S. antitrust regulators. Both Toshiba and Hitachi have also fallen under the watchful eye of the U.S. Department of Justice and will have their optical device divisions investigated, The Inquirer reports.

Once again, not a whole lot of details are yet known, but just like with Sony, it's believed that the DoJ is sniffing out something afoul with each optical makers' Blu-ray line. More specifically, it's likely each company is being probed for potential price fixing allegations.

Before being knocked out of contention, HD-DVD players could be snagged for as low as $99, which coincided with a promotion to receive a small handful of free HD-DVD movies through the mail. For the most part, Blu-ray pricing has yet to come down to the same level. It should also be noted that Sony, Hitachi, and Toshiba account for about 60 percent of the optical drive market, according to some statistics.

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Posted 10/27/09 at 06:21:51 PM by Jason Barry

There aren’t tons of details about what Sony is alluding too, but they have outwardly admitted to U.S. antitrust investigations. Antitrust regulators are taking a closer look at Sony's optical disk drive operations.

Sony Optiarc America, in particular, produces the Sony line of optical disk drives for DVD, CD, and Blu-ray media formats and is the focus of the investigation. Sony didn’t hint to which products are of interest, but if you like to follow the gossip circles (or have a bit of common-sense) it is likely something to do with Blu-ray.

Blu-ray’s prices have yet to see the traditional price declination expected from a hot technology that has been released over three years ago. In fact, prices have remained steady over that time despite HD-DVD disappearing from the picture.
 
Further, the technology hasn’t skyrocketed in popularity the way Sony expected and antitrust investigations are not likely to help that process along.

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Posted 10/15/09 at 05:48:37 PM by Jason Barry

Intel’s piranha legal team is currently sinking its teeth into AMD as part of its defense in the antitrust case they lost across the pond. Let the feeding begin.

Intel drew first blood asking the courts to reprimand AMD for failing to retain documents pertaining to their filing against Intel back in June of 2005. Further, they are salting the wounds by claiming that not only were the documents lost, despite AMD boasting a new document retention system, but also AMD covered up its efforts to recover said documents.

Intel claims in a court filing “AMD failed to begin retaining documents when it reasonably anticipated the litigation, something that is required by law.”

It has gotten ugly quick and this is only the beginning. Do you think Intel is merely following legal protocol, going for the throat, or just being petty?

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Posted 09/28/09 at 08:52:07 PM by Pulkit Chandna

In July, the European Commission and Microsoft finally reached some common ground in their protracted dispute over the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, when Microsoft finally assented to the Commission’s favorite solution: a browser ballot. But the European Commission wants to make sure that the proposed browser ballot doesn’t eventually turn out be a well thought out artifice.

Soon after receiving Microsoft’s assent, the Commission secretly sent out a questionnaire about the proposed ballot screen to browser developers and PC makers. The Wall Street Journal has managed to get its hand on the results of that questionnaire.

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a non-profit association, which includes Norwegian browser maker Opera among its ranks, isn’t quite convinced by the idea of a ballot screen and the manner in which Microsoft has proposed to implement it. ECIS believes that the entire process of choosing a different browser contains “threatening and confusing warnings and questions.”

"Microsoft has cunningly found a way to accept the commission's suggestion of a ballot screen, but to do so in a way that will be entirely ineffective," ECIS's lawyer, Thomas Vinje, told the WSJ. Ironically, Microsoft plans to offer the ballot screen from within Internet Explorer. Though not opposed to the idea, Mozilla wants it to be modified.

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Posted 09/22/09 at 08:55:24 AM by Paul Lilly

Earlier this year, the European Commission nailed Intel with a record setting $1.45 billion fine for what it construed as anticompetitive practices, and on Monday the EC published a non-confidential version of its Intel Decision laying out all the details that led to the hefty fine.

The EC seems to have taken particular exception to conditional rebates offered by Intel, listing no less than five scenarios, including rebates to Dell from December 2002 to December 2005 in exchange for purchasing exclusively Intel CPUs. But according to the paper, Intel also dangled the conditional carrot in front of Acer, HP, NEC, Lenovo, and Media Saturn Holding during various times from 2002 up until as recently as 2007.

Not only did Intel dictate how much AMD-based product each OEM could sell, but the chip maker also had clear directions on how AMD systems could be sold, according to the paper. For example, Intel payments to Acer were conditioned on Acer postponing the launch of an AMD-based notebook from September 2003 to January 2004. Lenovo was also advised to postpone a notebook launch, while payments to HP were conditioned on the OEM selling AMD-based business desktops only to small and medium enterprises, and only via direct distribution channels.

And that's only a portion of the paper. Get all the gory details here, then hit the jump and tell us whether you think the $1.45 billion fine was warranted or if Intel was doing what any company in its position would do.

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