Intel has agreed today to stop unfair practices including using threats and giving unfair discounts to block out rivals.
The company settled with the FTC (U.S. Federal Trade Commission) without paying any fine and without admitting any wrongdoing.
Furthermore, Intel pledged to give its rivals access to processor technology for the next six years.
Intel had been sued by Nvidia and rival AMD over the unfair practices. The Nvidia case is still pending.
The chip-maker has 80 percent of the microprocessor market.
“It’s a landmark settlement that really will have a striking effect on improving competition in the market,” says former FTC policy director David Balto.
Intel is now banned from “retaliating” against computer makers if they chose to do business with AMD or other non-Intel suppliers.
The European Union, Korea and Japan have all, over the past couple of years, accused Intel of similar unfair/anti-trust practices.
Result for: landmark
In early 2007, media giant Viacom demanded that Google take down copyrighted content from YouTube.
Afterwards, Viacom sued the site and its search giant owners for $1.2 billion USD, claiming Google facilitated the uploading the copyrighted videos through YouTube while doing little to deter it.
This week, Google has won the landmark case over the media companies, with a federal judge throwing out the lawsuit.
“Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough,” writes Judge Louis Stanton. “The provider need not monitor or seek out facts indicating such activity.”
Viacom said it plans to appeal, calling the Judge’s ruling “fundamentally flawed,” as it does not reflect recent Supreme Court decisions.
The media giant is behind such hit channels like MTV and Comedy Central, and also owns the Paramount movie studio. A few of the shows that Viacom alleged were readily available on YouTube, in their entirety, were “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “South Park,” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
Google had argued they were entitled to “safe harbor” protection under the DMCA, and it appears that Judge Stanton agreed.
Result for: landmark
As of today, the first ever “dotcom” has celebrated its 25th birthday, an Internet landmark. On March 15th, 1985 Symbolics computers purchased the first domain with a dotcom ending, becoming one of just 6 companies/individuals to do so in 1985. In 1997, the one millionth dotcom was registered, a number that has since exploded. “This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for the rest of the internet,” adds Mark Mclaughlin, Verisign CEO. Verisign is in charge of the entire dotcom domain. “Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today. This really was a groundbreaking event.” In 2010, 668,000 dotcom sites are registered every month, and 57 million domain names were registered between the year 2000 and 2010. For the 15 years preceding it, only 21 million domain names were registered. McLaughlin of Verisign also adds that it currently logs 53 billion requests for websites every day, and “we expect that to grow in 2020 to somewhere between three and four quadrillion.”
