Submission Number: 550006-00008 

Received: 8/18/2010 1:56:00 PM
Commenter: Daniel Jensen
Organization: 
State: 
Agency: Federal Trade Commission
Initiative: Proposed Consent Agreement In the Matter of Intel Corporation, a corporation; FTC Docket No. 9341
Attachments: No Attachments
Submission Text
The FTC's recent settlement with Intel betrays consumers. Though Intel has been involved in many anti-competitive practices, the one which hurt consumers and Intel's competitors the most was that they illegally used their CPU monopoly to kill competition in the chipset space. They did this by designing their next generation of products (Nehalem and above) to be incompatible with others' chipsets and refusing to license the technology (DMI/QPI) necessary to interface with these processors. It's bad enough that this has killed off the third-party chipset space, severely hurting VIA, SiS, and nVidia and allowing Intel to charge monopolist prices for its Nehalem chipsets while failing to innovate (for instance, with no competition, Intel has pushed off implementing
USB3- a standard they were in charge of designing- in their own chipsets until at least 2012). What's worse is that this means Intel can force everyone to purchase their GPUs and kill off GPU competition.
No settlement with Intel which does not force them to license DMI and QPI on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to third parties can possibly satisfy the demands of antitrust law or adequately protect consumers.