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Microprocessor manufacturer Intel has been fielding legal complaints against it in Europe and Asia for a while now, but this morning New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a lawsuit against the company for anti-competitive practices.
According to Ashlee Vance’s article in The New York Times, the state claims that Intel has been using its position in the microprocessor marketplace to strong-arm Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) out of the way, which violates both state and national law.
Have you ever played Pit, the commodities card game? It always seems like it might be a little boring — trading barley or hay sounds awfully tame, after all. But then you realize you’re gaining a corner on barely and everything gets really intense.
Well last year, the dairy pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange saw a little action of its own. According to NPR, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) and former executives $12 million for trying to inflate the price of cheddar cheese.
The incident sounds bizarre, but it’s systemic of a wider problem: monopolization and manipulation in the dairy business. The proof is in the (milk) pudding: Despite the lowest raw milk prices in 40 years, consumers aren’t seeing much of a dip in supermarket prices. Instead, dairy giants are increasingly forcing down what they pay to farmers, leaving dairy farms in the lurch.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether the boards of directors at Google and Apple are violating antitrust laws. As it stands, the two companies share two directors. One of them is Arthur Levinson, the former CEO of biotech firm Genentech. The other is Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s CEO. According to an article by Miguel Helft and Brad Stone in The New York Times this morning, Google and Apple may be violating section 8 of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. The law prohibits boards from sharing directors if it interferes with the companies competing with one another.
But how do they compete? With the iPhone and smart phones powered by Google’s Android operating system, there’s an increasing amount of competition between the two. And then there’s the Web browser market, in which Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome are nibbling at the heels of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
Microsoft and the European Union are engaged in an important antitrust court case. It must be Wednesday.
The Microsoft corporation is no stranger to antitrust lawsuits. Way back in 1989, the United States Federal Trade Commission began an investigation. The FTC was concerned that IBM and Microsoft had formed an alliance that effectively ensured all PCs would ship with the Microsoft version of the DOS operating system. Whether you agree with it or not, the company has a reputation for leveraging its influence to dominate the market.
Skipping ahead to today, Microsoft faces another antitrust case. This time the investigative body is the European Commission (EC), a legislative body of the European Union (EU). The EC has leveled antitrust charges on Microsoft before. This time the focus is on Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer.
The EC has a problem with the way Microsoft bundles Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system.
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