FTC gives Intel a pass, while Microsoft just gives up

by Jeff Dorsch, October 22nd, 2007, 12:04 pm

The New York Times reports today that Deborah P. Majoras, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, is digging in her heels on launching a formal antitrust investigation against Intel, despite importuning by AMD, other FTC commissioners, and lawmakers. The story is getting a lot of traction around the Web. Although the European Commission and South Korean antitrust regulators recently brought anticompetitive charges against Intel, alleging that its business practices seek to maintain its near-monopoly on the microprocessor market, the FTC (or at least its chief) doesn’t see it that way. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, Microsoft is throwing in the towel on its epic antitrust struggle with the European Commission, agreeing to sell proprietary programming code at a nominal cost to competitors in the computer server software market, such as IBM and Sun Microsystems. Microsoft had already paid fines of almost 1B euros ($1.43B) to the European regulators, and was facing additional fines of up to 1.6B euros.

And elsewhere on the seas of international high-tech competition, an International Trade Commission (ITC) administrative law judge recommended suspending Nokia’s patent infringement complaint against QUALCOMM, noting that the two competitors are already in arbitration. That’s the news, brought to you by the people behind the Full Employment for Lawyers Act!