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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fastpathguru who wrote (259507)	4/6/2009 5:27:17 PM
From: Elmer Phud	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Now fpg, we were doing so well and now you have to go and misrepresent my position again. Protecting competition is good as long and it benefits consumers, which is it's real intention. And yes, if there can not be shown to be any harm to consumers then protecting competition for it's own sake will reward incompetence when it can not be shown that failure is the result of an abusive monopoly. Furthermore, an abusive monopoly is not measured solely by the failure of it's competitor. One last thing, competition has not necessarily failed because a competitor has. It may be proof that competition works. Your idea of competition would be a baseball game that never ends but is forever in extra innings. Sometimes someone wins and someone else loses.

To: fastpathguru who wrote (259507)	4/6/2009 6:03:25 PM
From: wbmw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: "Protecting consumers as opposed to competition" - These are not mutually exclusive They are if the consumer is already benefitting from lower prices, and if the outcome of an anti-trust investigation is to legislate against using price to win market share. Elmer's point is that the consumer would lose out on the competitive pricing if that were the case. Re: [the following is wrong:] the only goal of antitrust law is to protect consumers Are we talking the letter of the law or the spirit of the law with this sentence? Why bother inventing legislation if it doesn't protect the consumer? Re: the only alternative to solely protecting consumers, i.e. enforcing antitrust laws without requiring explicit (as opposed to implicit) consumer harm, is that "incompetence is rewarded" as if a competitor who has been victimized by an abusive monopoly does not deserve justice A competitor who has been driven out of business because they are inefficient does not deserve justice. That's how our capitalistic system of survival-of-the-fittest is supposed to work. The spirit of anti-trust is to prevent an inefficient company from delivering a less competitive product at loss-leading prices to drive out a competitor. It's a good law, and it currently exists. But this discussion uses the hypothesis of preventing an efficient company from delivering an effective product at competitive above-cost pricing, and that's not currently illegal, nor should it be - even if it still ends up driving the competitor out of business. Now, this has all been high level and objective. If you agree so far, then we can talk about whether this applies to Intel or AMD in particular. But do you agree so far...?