EU publishes its case against Intel

The European Commission has published a press release and a summary of the ruling (PDF) that it claims justify fining Intel a record $1.45bn. The press release says:

Intel abused its dominant position in the x86 CPU market by implementing a series of conditional rebates to computer manufacturers and to a European retailer and by taking other measures aimed at preventing or delaying the launch of computers based on competing products (so-called 'naked restrictions'). The Commission's Decision outlines specific cases of these conditional rebates and naked restrictions, as well as how Intel sought to conceal its practices and how computer manufacturers and Intel itself recognised the growing threat represented by the products of Intel's main competitor, AMD.

Intel has responded in a statement that says:

We are convinced that the Commission's conclusions regarding our business practices are wrong, both factually and legally. We have appealed the Commission's decision Intel is committed to ethical business behavior and compliance with all applicable laws and regulations governing business practices. We are convinced that we've adhered to those standards and acted legally at all times in this matter.
The Commission relied heavily on speculation found in emails from lower level employees that did not participate in the negotiation of the relevant agreements if they favored the Commission's case. At the same time, they ignored or minimized hard evidence of what actually happened, including highly authoritative documents, written declarations and testimony given under oath by senior individuals who negotiated the transactions at issue. (Quoted from VentureBeat)

The EU has been unusually quick to publish evidence to back up its case. Bloomberg quotes Dennis Oswell, a competition lawyer with Oswell & Vahida in Brussels, saying: "The commission is playing the public-relations game."

However, it may be because it was criticised by its own ombudsman for failing to record 'potentially exculpatory' evidence from a Dell witness.

AMD has been shopping its complaints round the globe, and has launched its own cases against Intel in the US and Tokyo. America's FTC has also investigated Intel twice this century, without taking any significant action. (There was an FTC ruling against Intel concerning the supply of technical information.)

The bulk of the complaints in the EU case seem to concern the period from Autumn 2002 to the end of 2005. In 2003, AMD launched the Opteron and Athlon 64 processors, code-named Hammer, offering Windows users 64-bit processing at a time when the Itanium was still Intel's main 64-bit solution. However, the Opteron/Athlon combination failed to hammer Intel, which had a huge success with the heavily promoted, Wi-Fi-oriented Centrino brand, launched in February 2003. Intel then followed AMD's lead in extending the 32-bit x86 line for 64-bit operations.