EU likely to fine Intel for anti-competitive behavior

[heruamon]

NJ5 said:
@crumas2: Maybe I shouldn't have put it that way, but I was dismayed to see someone say the EU has nothing to do with this because it's between two American companies. When clearly these things were happening under EU's jurisdiction, making it trivial to say it's EU law to be applied.

I'm not sure why they're not going after the retailers. It depends on what the law is, perhaps this is not considered a real bribe so Intel only got nailed for it because they're already a monopoly, so the rules are more strict on them. But I'm just guessing here.

NYTimes has a little more in-depth  article on the topic today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/business/global/14compete.html?ref=business

And Intel is smart to not frame this as a Anti-American witchhunt (nevermind that AMD is a US company):

"Mr. Sewell, Intel’s lawyer, did not see “an inherent anti-U.S. bias in the commission’s enforcement practices” in its decision to impose its highest ever fine on Intel."

But, imho the fact of the matter is this smacks of a backdoor tax on US companies who have any operations in EU zone:

"The commission can levy fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s annual global sales. Intel’s sales were $37.6 billion in 2008; thus, the company could have faced a penalty of close to $4 billion. Money collected in antitrust cases is added to the trade bloc’s annual budget of around 130 billion euros."

Considering the fact that they are looking at Apple, Cisco, Google, Rhambus and Qualcomm...all I'm saying is that this is the kind of behavior that lead to trade wars.  Taxing Foreign companies and adding it to your annual budget is a TAX...call it a fine or whatever you want...it's like giving out a riddiculous amount of traffic fines to boost your municipality's budget...imho of course.