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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

You create the conditions for future complexity if you only allow winner takes all.

AMD was bailed out for years as Intel was king, and it’s a good thing they were.

When did AMD got bailed out?

When Intel kept settling lawsuits with them for large sums of money to avoid being broken up. These generous settlements kept AMD alive.

But that's not a bailout, it is compensation for harm that Intel had caused AMD by anti-competitive behaviors

Settling for 1/10th those amounts years later (after the lawsuits look like they are going badly) would compensation for anticompetitive behavior. Settling early for the full price (or more) is a bailout.

Lawsuits aren’t limited to the exact damages, Intel settled early to reduce the risk of a massive loss in the future.

It’s important to realize the lawsuit could easily have survived past the point where AMD failed as a company. Just as patents get sold off so too can potential damages from lawsuits.

They explicitly told people that they settled early (and generously) to avoid antitrust risk. Intel could have bankrupted AMD with the process. They chose to pay them a lot of money instead. Why? A bailout.

They said that due to good marketing rather than admit wrongdoing, but being a monopoly isn’t illegal. In fact they likely qualified as a monopoly at the time.

Compensation for blackmailing OEMs is now called a bail out.

You think Intel would settle all those lawsuits if Intel did nothing wrong?

I think that given AMD's balance sheet at the time, and the state of the lawsuits, they would have allowed them to run their course for a lot longer. Giving your competitors generous settlements at the beginning phases of a lawsuit is not usually good practice.

That’s like saying if I give you back the money I stole from you, I generously bailed you out.

Not the same thing at all.

AMD got bailed out when they transferred IP to China for a paltry few hundred million dollars.

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