Intel gets lump of antitrust coal in stocking from FTCIn what could be the "Microsoft trial" of the dawning decade, the FTC has announced a major antitrust suit against Intel. The chipmaker is crying foul, saying that the FTC's insistence on "unprecedented remedies" prevented a negotiated settlement.By Jon StokesIntel has to be glad to see 2009 drawing to a close, given the news of the past few months: the costly EU antitrust settlement, the New York antitrust suit, the costly AMD antitrust settlement, and the Larrabee failure. And now, to cap off a lousy 2009, the FTC has announced a major antitrust investigation into the same alleged anticompetitive practices that the company has been denying in all of these other cases."Intel has engaged in a deliberate campaign to hamstring competitive threats to its monopoly," said Richard A. Feinstein, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition, in a prepared statement. "It's been running roughshod over the principles of fair play and the laws protecting competition on the merits. The Commission's action today seeks to remedy the damage that Intel has done to competition, innovation, and, ultimately, the American consumer."Harsh words, but if you've read any of our coverage of the Intel antitrust saga, the statements are not surprising. What may be surprising, though, is that the FTC is targeting a major American company at a time when the economy is struggling to stem the disappearance of jobs, much less create new ones. Intel itself seems keen to play up exactly this issue, dropping the following, otherwise off-topic line into its official response to the antitrust news: "Intel announced earlier this year that the company is investing $7 billion in its U.S. manufacturing operations and employs more than 40,000 people domestically."Of course, what Intel doesn't say is that it has 92,500 employees worldwide, which means that only 43 percent of its workforce is in the US. The fact that Intel has been steadily decreasing the percentage of its domestic workforce over the past decade has been a huge sore spot for US-based Intel employees, but we've heard that the company doesn't mind pointing out to workers who complain that less than 20 percent of its revenues come from the US. So with a minority of its employees here in the US, and only a small slice of its revenue base here, Intel's claim to being a great American manufacturing company rests on a small—and, prior to the financial crisis, shrinking—body of evidence.In the end, though, Intel's Americanness, or lack thereof, may not have had an impact on the FTC one way or the other. The Obama FTC has made it known from the outset that it plans to take trust-busting seriously, so it may be that the Commission was always going to wrap up its multiyear investigation of Intel with a high-profile antitrust lawsuit.For its part, Intel claims that the case should've already been settled. Intel senior vice president and general counsel Doug Melamed asserts that "settlement talks had progressed very far but stalled when the FTC insisted on unprecedented remedies—including the restrictions on lawful price competition and enforcement of intellectual property rights set forth in the complaint—that would make it impossible for Intel to conduct business."The chipmaker further alleges that the FTC tacked on a bunch of new claims at the last minute in order to prevent a settlement and justify a suit.Either way, the announcement will provide some holiday cheer to rivals NVIDIA and AMD, both of whom have been the loudest complainers about Intel's alleged anticompetitive practices.
a large smelly piece of coal in the intel stocking,they've been charged with but admitted to anti-competitive, monopolistic despot XD
