We expect more from Eric Schmidt. This is the guy who pushed antitrust regulators to get involved in the tech industry throughout his career at Sun and Novell. He wrote the book on how "tying" a new product to your existing technological monopoly should be considered an aggressive, anticompetitive act. [...]
President of the Association for Competitive Technology, Jonathan Zuck, issued the following statement on the Intel-FTC settlement announced today. This agreement brings to a close the Commission’s case against Intel regarding alleged anti-competitive trade practices. As part of the settlement, Intel agreed to modify its rebate program and licensing agreements. [...]
As we’ve discussed before, the FTC recently decided to dust off its Section 5 authority to go after “unfair methods of competition” in lieu of using its tradition antitrust authority (Section 2) to pursue some of its tougher cases. This has many antitrust experts concerned, most notably, Bob Litan, former Clinton administration. Apparently, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is also concerned by the FTC’s use of Section 2.
As most readers know by now, the Federal Trade Commission ignored the pleas of ACT and 37 member companies for caution, and filed a lawsuit against Intel yesterday charging that the company has abused its dominant position in the computer chip market. What you may have missed yesterday, however, is the rather ironically timed announcement from the Obama administration that it is launching new policies to spur more manufacturing it the United States.
Today, we're kicking off a new feature on the blog, a weekly round up of the tech industry's various antitrust cases and "potential" antitrust concerns. While last week's antitrust news was dominated by competition concerns outside the technology industry (health insurers and the BCS), there were a few notable stories [...]