EETimes.com – EC charges Intel with anticompetitive practices — oops! The question this begs is where were the USA regulators? If this sort of thing was happening in Europe it was happening here too. Apparently we have no real antitrust mechanism that actually does anything. With that in mind why doesn’t Intel simply buy out AMD and end this agony?

EC antitrust regulators have concluded that Intel has abused its dominant position in the microprocessor market. The legal proceeding could end with a billion-euro fine for Intel, media reports here speculate.

In a statement of objections issued friday (July 27), the EU antitrust authority blames Intel of having infringed the EC antitrust rules in that the microprocessor giant had used practices aiming at excluding AMD as its main rival from the x86 market.

In its statement, the regulator accuses Intel of three types of abusing a dominant market position: First, Intel had provided ‘substantial rebates’ to several OEMs under the condition that they buy their microprocessors exclusively from Intel. Secondly, Intel paid to OEMs if they delayed or canceled the roll-out of products based on AMD CPUs. Thirdly, Intel has offered microprocessors to server OEMs under cost in order to block the competitor.