After the European Commission, and the State of New York, the well known federal US authority, the Federal Trade Commission decided to look closer at Intel's business strategies and practices. Without much surprise, as it was based on similar document already quoted by the European Commission in EU, the FTC decided to sue Intel, accusing the chip maker of using its dominant market position “to stifle competition and strengthen its monopoly". In the document, the FTC accuses Intel for having systematically blocked its rivals (mostly AMD) from selling their CPU by different strategies aiming to limit their access to the market.
Unlike the EC charges and complains from the State of New York mostly targeting Intel's monopoly based on rebates and co-marketing arrangements to persuade computer makers to use its CPUs instead of those from AMD, FTC complaints go beyond the CPU-centric claims and extend on video graphics chips and software. This could strongly help NVIDIA to finally get a license for the new forthcoming CPU platform from Intel in order to offer compatible third-party chipset for such CPUs (Nehalem).
Even though the settlement found by Intel and AMD in the recent weeks, the first one paying 1.25 billion US to the second, to stop all actions covering both private antitrust and patent claims, by extending its complains to GPU and software, the FTC aims to put pressure on Intel to correct such unfair business practice, and this time earlier than later. Indeed, most of the complains from AMD are several years old, while complains from NVIDIA are only current and being discussed and the topic of legal action between both companies for couple of months. Intel can lose a lot in this lawsuit, and it will for sure strengthen the EC in its legal action.
