Wednesday, January 26th 2022
EU Court Withdraws €1.06 billion Intel Antitrust Fine
Remember that €1.06 billion antitrust lawsuit that Intel was slapped with by the European Commission back in 2009? It's ok if you don't, but it involved Intel being accused of "market malpractice, by influencing computer hardware manufacturers to postpone and/or cancel launches of their products that use CPUs made by its rival AMD" based on our own reporting from 2009. As these thing goes, Intel appealed to a higher court and that higher court handed back the case to the lower court who has now withdrawn the fine and the judges went as far as to say "The (European) Commission's analysis is incomplete and does not make it possible to establish to the requisite legal standard that the rebates at issue were capable of having, or likely to have, anticompetitive effects,".
The European Commission has said it will study the new judgement and will consider its next steps, but it seems unlikely that they'll be able to bring this case to court again, without some additional proof of wrongdoing. The end result of this is also likely to make it tougher to bring cases like to court in the future for the European Commission, as they will have to provide more detailed cases where they prove that things like MDF and rebates to their customers cause real, anti-competitive damages to other companies in the same line of business, in this case AMD. The case can still be appealed to the CJEU, so this 13 year saga might still not be over.
Source:
Reuters
The European Commission has said it will study the new judgement and will consider its next steps, but it seems unlikely that they'll be able to bring this case to court again, without some additional proof of wrongdoing. The end result of this is also likely to make it tougher to bring cases like to court in the future for the European Commission, as they will have to provide more detailed cases where they prove that things like MDF and rebates to their customers cause real, anti-competitive damages to other companies in the same line of business, in this case AMD. The case can still be appealed to the CJEU, so this 13 year saga might still not be over.
27 Comments on EU Court Withdraws €1.06 billion Intel Antitrust Fine
Maybe this is because intel gave EU the finger in their upcoming CPU initiative?
I was trying for a chicken dinner, but this was the best I could do.
The fines should be commensurate to the extent that such corporations never try to pull that same sh!t ever again! But I guess when you're big enough they just let you do it :shadedshu:
AMD did got hurt by practices of Intel. How many stores only sold Intel products while AMD was on the better lead overall? Athlon, A64 etc. I'm glad i never spend any dime in Intel products since the K6 era.
According to this video
According to the video , this would change when the New York Attorney General also filed a (Federal antitrust) lawsuit against Intel and in that upcoming trial the public would be informed about all these confidential documents (19:40 of the video) .
It was at this moment that AMD chose to settle with Intel ,thus not only ending the Federal case before the public knows about all the facts , but also leaving the EU's case legally compromised as it was proved with the recent news we read in this TPU thread.
Met him a couple of years ago, nice guy.