Hacker News Reader

Comment by salient | Hacker News Reader

Intel is one of the least ethical tech companies around. Have they even paid their 1 billion euro fine to the EU Commission yet for trying to force OEMs to not use AMD chips in their products?

http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/13/intel-fined-1-45-billion-...

View on HN

I wouldn't be surprised if they had. Off the top of my head they made over $7 billion doing this and can consider the fine as a cost of doing business.

When companies do this, they should be fully audited and fined 300% profit, split evenly between the harmed company and the government. If that puts them out of business, so be it.

That would certainly discourage _getting caught_ violating the law.

It would also tend to kill off the older companies (weak law of large numbers: if a company violates any of the laws that will kill it, and it exists long enough, it eventually gets caught and killed).

It might even lead to some efforts at counter-legislation. For example, companies might lobby to _broaden_ the "get killed" legislation, which would result in lots of sympathy cases where companies were killed for "minor" offenses. Eventually the whole "kill the company" idea would fall out of favor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law

(Companies will tend to view a government audit as a death sentence, since it would damage them so much even without a 300% fine.)

I'd support fines that are proportional to general revenue or profit. A fine must hurt.

Also, an audit and 300% fines would probably not kill companies.

There is plenty of space to the bottom though.. Intel at least publishes datasheets, technical documentation, etc. without requiring signing a NDA for most of their chips..

So in my books they still do quite a bit better than Broadcom, Realtek, etc.

I agree, although Intel is still not as open as they were back in the e.g. 8086 days - stuff related to the BIOS/memory controller init sequence is still AFAIK requiring NDA.

Better than AMD, at least - just try finding the pinout of socket AM2, which was released over 7 years ago.

This is one of the reasons I only purchase AMD-based systems. Well that and the fact that AMD's CPU/GMU combo has better graphics performance.

It's either that or support a company whose market advantage is based on anti-competitive practices and who will spend a significant portion of their profits on reducing consumer's choice of CPU (up to the point they no longer have to of course).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com