Re: Conspiracy... What conspiracy? -- a double-standard?

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 11:14 -0500, William Underwood wrote:
> Samsung to pay $300M fine for DRAM price fixing
> It will plead guilty to being part of an 'international conspiracy'
> http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/legalissues/story/0,10801,105431,00.html
> Thought it might interest some of you....

At first, I was happy to see this, because the Asian rim of company have
kept prices artificially high using various excuses.  They've gone from
razor-thin margins or even running fabs at a loss (because it's more of
a loss to shut them down) to healthy profits.

But then I thought about things again.  First off, we're talking
extremely massive volumes and in many cases, the profits they make on
memory are _less_ than the profits Dell, Gateway and other Tier-1 OEMs
make on memory mark-up in their systems.  Now keep that in mind as we
look at where the complaints are coming from -- Dell, Gateway and other
Tier-1 OEMs.

*SO*, if Dell, Gateway, etc... are allowed to complain about the Asian
rim of companies who run multi-billion dollar fabs that lose money for 3
years, then make a healthy profit for 3 years, etc..., then *CONSUMERS*
should have the right to hold Dell, Gateway and other Tier-1 OEMs to the
_same_standard_ when we go to configure a system and we pay 2-3x the
price for the _exact_same_ memory than we can get directly from Crucial,
Infineon, etc...

Sometimes I think consumers are merely prey for the massive number of
lawyers in this country, and they do little for us.  Yes, price fixing
did occur.  And yes, people profited, but how "fair" is it that we have
only penalized companies based outside the US, and not the ones based on
the US that pull the same non-sense, and often using foreign products
anyway?

Or maybe that's just my Libertarian views getting in the way of good
regulation.  I don't know, still seems like a double-standard.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     b.j.smith@ieee.org     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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