The
commission is investigating claims by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
that Intel abused its dominant market position to compete unfairly.
The commission has raided a number of Intel offices in Europe as
well as the offices of computer manufacturers.
The German antitrust regulator Bundeskartellamt had been
pursuing a case involving an AMD complaint that Intel had pressured
retail company Media Markt to refuse to sell computers running on
AMD chips. The German regulator has now agreed to allow the
commission to subsume that investigation into its own.
"The commission is concerned that Intel has been putting
pressure on Media Markt not to stock computers that include AMD
chips as opposed to Intel chips," EU spokesman Jonathan Todd told
reporters.
The commission's investigation dates from 2001 and focuses on
whether or not Intel used its dominant position to try to force PC
manufacturers not to use AMD's chips.
Though Intel was once so dominant on computers using the Windows
operating system that the phrase Wintel was coined to describe the
machines, AMD has enjoyed something of a commercial resurgence.
Though AMD was barred from competing in the PC chip market until
1995, competition since then has begun to bear fruit. Chips from
AMD can now be found in Dell computers and Intel's market share has
been hit.
That competition from AMD forced Intel last week to cut 10% of
its staff. It announced that 10,000 employees would be forced out
of the company by the middle of 2007, a move that analysts put down
to competition from AMD.
That loss of market share is likely to be used by Intel as an
argument in its antitrust cases. It could argue that the fact that
it is losing market share is proof that it has not abused its
market dominance.
"I think this is an argument that Intel will put forward but I
don't think it will make a difference," said Angelo Basu, a
competition law specialist at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind
OUT-LAW. "It is one of those things where you are damned either
way: if you have benefited it is bad and if you haven't benefited
it's bad luck, but neither of these would strengthen a competition
case."
Basu said that the European Commission's actions in taking over
the German case show that it wants to ensure consistency across
Europe. "They don't want people taking cases in different countries
and getting a whole series of different results," he said. "They
want to see consistency across Europe and they want to be the ones
to make the decision about it."
