The European Commission said Friday that it has filed monopoly charges against Intel Corp., accusing the world's biggest computer chipmaker of abusing its market power.
Intel may face fines if found guilty, the European Union's antitrust watchdog said.
The commission holds the preliminary view that Intel abused its dominant market position with the aim of excluding its main rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) from the x86 computer processing units (CPU) market.
According to the commission, Intel allegedly breached EU antitrust rules by engaging in three types of abuse of its dominant market position.
First, Intel provided substantial rebates to various "original equipment manufacturers" (OEMs) conditional on them obtaining all or the great majority of their CPU requirements from Intel.
Secondly, in a number of instances, Intel made payments in order to induce an OEM to either delay or cancel the launch of a product line incorporating an AMD-based CPU.
Thirdly, Intel offered CPUs below cost to strategic customers in the server segment of the market while these customers were making bids for AMD-based products.
Each of these alleged actions by Intel was an abuse of its dominant position and they were part of a single overall anti-competitive strategy, the commission said.
The charges were sent to Intel Thursday and the company will have 10 weeks to reply to them, it added.
Source: Xinhua
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