New York attorney general files antitrust lawsuit against Intel

An Indian model holds an Intel Xeon processor 7400 series product in 2008. Credit: NV Jagadeesh/EPA.

New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo today filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, alleging that the company engaged in "a worldwide, systematic campaign of illegal conduct" to further its business and stifle competitors.

“Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market,”  Cuomo said in a statement. “Intel’s actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitors, but also hurt average consumers, who were robbed of better products and lower prices."

Cuomo's office maintained that Intel paid or threatened some of the world's leading computer makers -- Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM among them -- to prevent the companies from doing business with Intel's main rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.  The payments, the complaint alleges, came in the form of high-dollar "rebates" to the computer makers, though Cuomo's office dismissed the rebates as "payoffs" that Intel made to hide their true nature.

The case is assembled in part from internal e-mails collected from Intel's business partners and from within the company itself, according to the filing.

“'I understand the point about the accounts wanting a full AMD portfolio,'" wrote an IBM executive in 2005, according to a statement from Cuomo's office. "'The question is, can we afford to accept the wrath of Intel …?'”

Intel could not immediately be reached for comment.

The lawsuit is a result of a nearly two-year investigation by Cuomo's office, in which investigators say they evaluated millions of pages of documents and e-mails and interviewed dozens of witnesses.

The suit was filed in federal court in Delaware and aimed to bar Intel from what it called "further anti-competitive acts," and recover damages to New York consumers and government entities.

In May, the European Commission fined Intel nearly $1.5 billion over similar charges of anti-competitive practices, saying the results harmed millions of European consumers.  Intel disagreed with those charges and vowed to appeal the decision.

-- David Sarno

What to look for at the Mobile World Congress

Last year's Mobile World Congress. Credit: ya po guille via Flickr.

Get ready for a week of phone porn, filled with talk about LTE, femtocells and MVNOs. The Mobile World Congress, the cellphone industry's version of the Consumer Electronics Show, kicks off in Barcelona on Monday.

Thousands of mobile industry professionals will converge on the Spanish city to show off their new gear, announce previously secretive products and try to convince one another that the industry will weather the economic downturn. Research group Strategy Analytics predicted last month that the global mobile phone market would shrink 9% in 2009.

Even if you don't know what those terms above mean (here's a cheat sheet), there's a lot for the casual phone nerd to be excited about, including solar-powered phones, a Nokia app store and "Opera Turbo," which, sadly, is not an opera performed on motorbikes but a mobile Web browser. In case you aren't traveling to Barcelona, here are some things ...

Dell: It's not about the music player

Like a popular mayor declaring he's not going to run for president after all, Dell has scrapped plans for a new MP3 player and subscription service, according to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, Dell says in a blog post, the company's strategy "has never been about a music player." Glad we got that straightened out, but I actually liked the idea of Dell developing an inexpensive WiFi-enabled player that could tune in streams from a variety of sources. The secret sauce behind the rumored player was software from Zing, a Silicon Valley start-up that Dell acquired last year.

"As we said a few months ago, our strategy focuses on content offerings and delivery platforms that mix Zing software, remote access and pre-configured media bundles across all of our devices, including licensing agreements with entertainment distributors," Jay Pinkert wrote on the Dell blog. What that's meant so far is offering to preload new PCs with bundles of MP3s or DRM-encrusted movies for about half the price of individual downloads. That strikes me as a weak offer, especially considering how few options there are (you can't build your own bundles, and there are only 14 packages of music or movies to choose from). Beyond that, what's the no software breakthrough involved in planting some MP3s on a hard drive? What would be more interesting -- and where Dell appears to be going, although it wouldn't say so today -- is if the Zing software became the connective tissue between pieces of each customer's domain. In other words, the software would make it easy to access all your content (pictures, songs, videos or even subscription services) from any device, no matter where it might be stored.

For what it's worth, I was a fan of the Sansa Connect player with Zing software, which originally worked with Yahoo's subscription music service to deliver a nifty "any track, anywhere" experience. (OK, make that an "any track in our limited collection, anywhere you can get free WiFi" experience.) But the Connect became a lot less interesting after Yahoo's music service folded, eliminating users' ability to add songs or playlists to their collection wirelessly, impulsively and at no incremental cost. I cling to the belief that WiFi can turn an MP3 also-ran into a real iPod competitor, given the right back-end service to provide the content. The Slacker G2 is one interesting example, although it's pricey and doesn't have the marketing muscle needed to change how people think about music consumption. With the major labels becoming much more willing to experiment with ad-supported and freemium models, I think it's just a matter of time before someone comes through with an offer that trumps the iPod's approach (i.e. local storage and 99 cents per incremental track). But then, that could very well be Apple.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Samsung jumps into U.S. laptop market, taking on Apple, HP and Dell

Apple wasn't the only technology bigwig to weigh in on the laptop market today. Samsung Electronics this morning announced it would dive into the hypercompetitive U.S. laptop market later this year.

Samsung will have its work cut out for it, with Chinese manufacturers nibbling away at the low end of the market with ever cheaper machines and big brands dominating the more profitable premium end. But the South Korean company has taken on other Goliaths -- and won. Most notably, it wrested the title from Sony as the largest seller of flat-screen television sets in the country. And now, it's setting its sights on notebooks.

The game plan for taking on this market appears to be similar to its strategy for tackling TVs: Aim high.

Samsung is introducing five models priced between $1,049 and $2,499 later this year. You can read the specs here. The theory is that shoppers who spend less than $1,000 are looking purely at price. Those who spend more tend to value design and high-end features such as anti-bacterial keyboards, lightweight and long battery life -- features that Samsung aims to deliver with its machines.

"We're looking for the more loyal buyer with more discriminating tastes," said Dave McFarland, Samsung's senior product marketing manager.

Will Samsung succeed? The company last year rang up more than $103 billion in sales, making it one of the world's biggest consumer-electronics powerhouses. It's also made and sold laptops outside of North America since 1983. But when it comes to the U.S. laptop business, Samsung is a newbie. Here, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Apple and Toshiba have the market practically locked up. The five players claimed 77% of the North American notebook market in the second quarter, according to DisplaySearch.

Today, Apple made Samsung's job a little harder, introducing a line of MacBooks that feature, among other things, a glass touchpad.

-- Alex Pham

Photo courtesy of Samsung

Google launches new push for access to vacant TV channels

As we wrote earlier this year, Google is getting the hang of influencing policy in Washington. The company took another step -- albeit a small one -- today as it pushed federal regulators to open up a swath of wireless airwaves to Internet access.

For the first time, Google has launched an advocacy website, FreeTheAirwaves.com, to urge the Federal Communications Commission to allow yet-to-be-developed mobile gadgets to surf the Internet on vacant TV channels. The site includes an online petition that produces a form letter to the FCC, and it also allows people to upload to a special YouTube channel their own video testimonials about the importance of expanded wireless broadband access (such as the one above by Matthew Rantanen of Tribal Digital Village, which provides wireless Internet service to Indian tribes in San Diego and Riverside counties).

"Google is a strong believer in the potential of this spectrum to bring Internet access to more of the country," Minnie Ingersoll, product manager for Google's Alternative Access Team, told reporters in a conference call today. "Now is an important time for people who care about the future of the Internet to make their voices heard."

Google, joined by other leading high-tech companies such as Microsoft and Dell, as well as some public interest groups, is locked in a battle with broadcasters over access to the unused TV channels in each market. Those airwaves are known as "white spaces."

The tech and public interest groups want the FCC to treat those airwaves like Wi-Fi, allowing anybody to use them for free with any mobile device they want. That's different from the spectrum that wireless phone companies such as Verizon and AT&T lease from the federal government; they limit the type of devices that can access it.

TV has some of the best airwaves, able to carry ...

Doing it the Dell way with new colorful laptops

Michael Tatelman, Dell's vice president of global consumer sales and marketing, was recently in San Francisco to unveil a new brand of Dell laptops, dubbed Studio, which go on sale in Best Buy and Staples stores in the next few days.

In the last year, Dell has made a bigger push into the consumer market by paying closer attention to design. Last year, with the Inspiron line, consumers could pick the color of their laptop from a palette of five colors.

Tatelman said the effort was beginning to pay off. In May, Dell reported that its consumer PC sales grew more than twice the industry rate during the first quarter and that the company had increased its global share of the consumer market by 1.2 percentage points, to 8.8%. (HP is still the king of global computer sales with 19%, compared with Dell's 15%, according to IDC. But in the first quarter, Dell increased its share, most dramatically in the U.S. Here, Dell's share is 31%, up from 28% in the same quarter last year. In the U.S., HP dropped slightly to 24% from 25%.)

The Studio laptops come with the customizable goodies one expects from Dell, such as optional back-lighted keyboard and a 15- or 17-inch screen. They'll cost $799 to $999 and go on sale tomorrow.

But what Tatelman wanted to talk about was how people personalize their laptops. With Studio, consumers will have two more colors to choose from -- plum purple and tangerine orange (chosen because it is also a common school color) -- and an array of accessories such as laptop bags and mice that can be color coordinated with the laptop.

Tatelman sniped at the competitors' approach to customers, indicating that Dell wasn't ready to cede the consumer market yet to Apple, with its thin MacBook Air, or to HP, with its TV ad campaign that focused on the hands of celebrities as they talked about their computers. He described Apple's approach as "we'll tell you what you want" and HP's as "they will tell you what you want." He described Dell's, of course, as "what do you want to do with this?"

And then, Tatelman pulled out a gadget that looked like a midget laptop, about the size of a paperback novel. It was actually a wooden demo model of a future Dell product: a portable Internet surfing device with a keyboard. Then he giggled and put it away.

-- Michelle Quinn

Photo: Dell