An editorial in today's New York Times complains that Intel's $1.25 billion antitrust settlement doesn't go far enough. It says, "Antitrust law can seem like an abstraction, but in the case of computer chips the impact on ordinary Americans is very real. Chips are a significant part of the cost of new desktop and laptop computers, and the quality of those chips has a big effect on computer performance. If Intel is using its market power to keep prices high and fend off better products, it is consumers — and not just competitors like A.M.D. — who are the losers." Of all the industries to in which to try to claim that consumers aren't seeing better products, computer chips doesn't seem to be the one; as Moore's Law describes, chip speed doubles every two years, while computer prices have stayed pretty much the same or dropped. As for keeping prices high, as I have noted elsewhere, for most of 1999 the price of the Times on a New York City newsstand was 60 cents. Today, in 2009, it's $2. That's a 333% increase. The quality of the printed New York Times certainly hasn't improved over the past decade in the same way that the power of a personal computer has over the same period. Yet the Times is jumping to the conclusion that Intel is using some illegal power to jack up its prices and prevent quality improvement. If the result of antitrust violations are the kind of price reductions and quality improvements we've seen in the computer industry, American consumers should hope for antitrust violations in the rest of the economy.
Intel and Antitrust
https://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2009/11/intel-and-antitrust
by Editor | Related Topics: Press receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list