EU Antitrust Regulator Scolded For Simply Ignoring Evidence In Intel’s Favor
With all of the problems with the EU it is amasing that they even let US companies sale anything in Europe. Check out this article about Dell and it’s use of Intel chips over AMD. Is it really the EU’s job to tell them what they should make and what parts they should use? The article came from Tech Dirt’s rss feed.
It’s no secret that we think that EU antitrust regulators are way too aggressive in pursuing antitrust claims against US tech companies. The EU continues to view market size as a problem, rather than looking as closely at actual anticompetitive behavior. And, now, it’s coming out that the EU’s antitrust regulators may be so overzealous to take down companies that they’ll ignore evidence that goes against their hypothesis. The EU’s ombudsman has apparently issued a report scolding EU antitrust regulators for flat-out ignoring evidence from a Dell executive concerning Intel and AMD. The EU, as you probably know, fined Intel €1 billion a few months back, finding that the company had abused monopoly powers to force hardware makers into using its chips. But, the EU’s ombud discovered that the antitrust regulators had interviewed Dell execs who said simply that AMD’s chips didn’t have the performance of Intel chips. In fact, in their tests, AMD’s chips were “very poor,” so they chose Intel chips entirely on the basis of performance. And… conveniently, the EU’s antitrust regulators simply failed to record this info and did not include it in their report. Of course, you can make anyone appear to have violated antitrust rules if you purposely ignore all evidence to the contrary.