Drat. DRAM not dram.
I was hoping for a cheap whisky ruling.
The European Commission has fined ten memory chip makers a total of €331m - as part of the first settlement made for cartel charges. Ten chipmakers were found guilty of running a cartel in order to fix prices. The fine was cut by ten per cent in recognition of the companies' acceptance of the facts. Micron had its fine …
There's an interesting question of timing here... when you join in a cartel you have to figure out how long its going to be useful to the members, because there's going to be a point at which the best thing to do is to hit the grass up button and get your opponents trashed without any penalty yourself, having gained all the advantage from being in the cartel...
For the really devious businessman there's a formidable incentive to promote a cartel and then blowing the whistle at the right moment - there's a much greater gain to be had than not joining a cartel at all. Who was it sais that legislation nearly always has the opposite effect to that intended? There's an oBvious figure who should have the icon with horns for this one, but the option isn't available...
Not only don't you get it back, you also have the privilege of paying a bit of the fine when you next buy memory. Isn't that just great? The EU really are looking after consumers.
I really do love this idea of fining large corporations huge sums of money to "protect the consumer." It's glaringly obvious that they'll just treat it as OpEx and then pass the hit on to us.
Obviously the alternative is to block sales for a while, but that also screws the EU's revenue stream by not getting the fine and losing out on taxes. I think I begin to see the motivation...