David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on October 1, 2013 12:43 am wrote:
> anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on September 30, 2013 11:32 pm wrote:

> > That has nothing to do with it. Whatever is in the realm of possibility in some nebulous future date
> > has nothing to do with a legal case. Intel has a monopoly in the PC market, and therefore they have
> > restrictions in what they can do in that and other markets where they do not have a monopoly.
>
> That statement might be true in English (I'm skeptical of that
> though; I don't think Intel really has a monopoly in PCs).
>
> However, in the parlance of antitrust, I'm not even sure "PC market" is a well formed idea.

In fact it is a well formed idea.

"Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market."

Microsoft was declared a PC OS monopoly in spite of small players such as Mac OS, OS/2, Linux/BSDs, UNIX workstations, etc. As well as a number of competing office applications.

Nowadays with Intel CPUs in Macs, and AMD having a lot of difficulty, I think Intel runs a tremendous risk of being found to have monopoly power if they do anything to step out of line.

> The reason why antitrust is tricky is that you cannot define a market along product lines.

See above.

> Markets are defined in terms of price sensitivities and substitution of goods.
>
> Basically, if Intel were to hike their prices by say $10 (on a permanent basis), then any product which
> an OEM might use instead is considered a competitor. AMD's x86 products are obvious competitors. However,
> for some products, ARM SoCs are also competitors (e.g., things running linux or android).

Well then Standard Oil was not a monopoly because you could just buy oil from another supplier, or get it from whales.

Monopoly rules are not just whether you can possibly get the product from elsewhere. It is the aggregate power in the market.

>
> It's easy to sling these terms around like "PC market" in a forum, but there are fairly precise
> definitions used in antitrust...which are rather different than a common language definition.

I sling the canonical PC-market legal precedent.

There was only a single time in memory that Intel might have argued that it did not enjoy monopoly power in the market, and that was after AMD launched Opteron and forced Intel to capitulate on 64-bit ISA. That was a long time ago, and things are very different now, however.

>
> > If Intel "rightly" argued that there is nothing stopping any mobile company owning its own Fab,
> > then their legal team would rightly deserve to be fired, because that would have nothing to do
> > with anything. What would be in question is their monopoly of x86 CPUs in the PC >market.
>
> They don't have a monopoly though. AMD is quite clearly a competitor for PC design wins.

Having a competitor != not a monopoly.

>
> > > Vertical vendors like IBM/Apple/Samsung also have
> > > more power to abuse price structures as they can sell any component under or even negative cost
> > > if they can make it up in another part of their product and/or ecosystem.
> >
> > Let's get back to topic.
> >
> > "Bizarrely enough, non-monopolies are legally allowed to get away with dumping and no-one
> > could really argue Intel is a monopoly in mobile chips and expect to win the case ;-)."
>
> > This statement is wrong because Intel does have a monopoly in other markets. I suspect they are already
> > very creative in circumventing these laws in ways which allows them to "encourage" IHVs to take up Atom
> > chips, probably on the edge of legality. But plain and simple dumping would be clearly crossing the line.
>
> I am not convinced Intel is a monopoly in the markets that their x86 chips sell into.

I'm convinced that their lawyers worry about the possibility.