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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DRBES who wrote (51378)	3/1/1999 7:00:00 PM
From: Bruce A. Thompson	Respond to of 1571405

More Spam from obvious INTC shorts: March 01, 1999 18:17 U.S. outlines antitrust charges against Intel By Aaron Pressman WASHINGTON, March 1 (Reuters) - The U.S. government on Monday laid out its charges against leading computer chip maker Intel Corp. ahead of the start next week of the second big antitrust case against a high-tech industry leader. In a 50-page court filing, the Federal Trade Commission said Intel was still abusing its monopoly power and repeated its charges that it had bullied three of its customers to maintain a stranglehold on the market. Intel is the dominant maker of microprocessors, the "brains" inside personal computers. It has rejected the charges, saying it does not have a monopoly and was not seeking to squash competition when disputes arose with Intergraph Corp. , Compaq Corp. , and Digital Equipment Corp., now a unit of Compaq. The government alleged that Intel forced the companies to turn over valuable technology patents that could otherwise have boosted competition in the markets for chips or related parts of personal computers. The case goes to trial before an FTC administrative law judge on March 9. The U.S. antitrust trial of Microsoft, the world's leading software maker, went into recess last week. For more than a decade, Intel has been the dominant supplier of processors for personal computers, collecting more than 80 percent of the revenues and billions in profits. But since the FTC complaint was filed last year, chip competitors Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and National Semiconductor Corp.'s Cyrix unit have made great strides in stealing business from Intel in popular low-end computers costing under $1,000. In Monday's filing, the FTC dismissed the importance of the shift at the low end. The agency said the market segment was a tiny part of the overall market and argued that AMD and Cyrix gained largely because Intel had ignored the cheaper computers. "It is questionable whether AMD and Cyrix can maintain their recent gains," the FTC said. After seeing the success of other firms, "Intel took aggressive steps to capture the new segment and is widely expected dramatically to gain share in the low-end segments." Small, well-publicized chip start-ups like Transmeta and Metaflow also will not restrain Intel's ability to monopolize the market, the FTC said. "These firms exert no competitive influence on Intel," the agency said. Much of the FTC's brief was not publicly released, including portions about the new chip start-ups, Intel's current market share and the prices it charges personal computer makers for its chips. FTC officials were not immediately available to comment, but often sensitive information obtained by regulators is not disclosed in court filings. Despite reports in recent weeks that the FTC might broaden its case to include other charges, the agency stuck to the three allegations made in its June brief. The agency said Intel forced Compaq and Digital to turn over important technology patents by threatening to withhold crucial information it shares with all its customers about upcoming chips. In the Intergraph case, Intel made the same threats but a federal district court ruled that Intel had to continue sharing the information with Intergraph