Schneiderman
WILMINGTON, Del. (Legal Newsline) - New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman cannot prove that Intel Corp. unfairly created a monopoly in the microprocessor market, the company is arguing.
Intel filed its motion for summary judgment last week in the antitrust lawsuit brought by Schneiderman's predecessor, now-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. It alleges the company threatened and punished companies it viewed as working too closely with its competitors.
New York's evidence does not meet the burden of demonstrating anticompetitive exclusion or antitrust injury, attorneys for Intel wrote Thursday.
"New York's allegations thus make clear that its monopoly maintenance case rests on competitor exclusion," Intel wrote.
"Yet, as New York's economic expert Frederick Warren-Boulton admitted: (1) New York cannot demonstrate that Intel excluded (Advanced Micro Devices), the only relevant competitor during the period at issue; and (2) New York does not base its claim of higher microprocessor prices - the alleged injury-causing mechanism - on the exclusion of AMD.
"Each of these concessions provides an independent ground for granting summary judgment to Intel on New York's Sherman Act and Donnelly Act claims."
Intel calls the damage claim under the Donnelly Act - the state's antitrust law - speculative and deficient. It says the method for determining how much recovery would be owed to state governmental entities and non-state public entities is inaccurate.
Cuomo filed the lawsuit in November 2009. He said the company cut off payments it was making to computer makers, funded those maker's competitors and ended joint development ventures
Cuomo says Intel paid rebates -- which he said were basically payoffs -- to obtain exclusive agreements with computer makers. Those payments were large enough to be the difference between loss and profit for some computer makers, he said.
Intel paid $2 billion to Dell in 2006, threatened HP with the derailment of a server technology and paid IBM $130 million not to launch an AMD-based server product, Cuomo says.
It also threatened to stop funding for an IBM/Intel joint project if IBM marketed AMD-based server products, he alleges.
From Legal Newsline: Reach John O'Brien by e-mail at jobrienwv@gmail.com.