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Nvidia offices raided by French competition authority
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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This is weird. I’m all for anti-monopoly policies and court action, but this doesn’t make sense. Did Nvidia buy out smaller graphic companies? I may be ignorant but the only ones I know is AMD and ATI who merged, and now intel is making their own. I guess I don’t see how Nvidia is a monopoly
E: I made this comment and the rest in the chain after a night of drinking high octane beers for my birthday. I’m an idiot
There's more to anticompetitive behaviour than just buying out small companies...
Nvidia has huge market share and uses their power as a weapon, in ways that are anticompetitive.
For example, in the past, they ~~bribed~~ financially encouraged devs to implement over-the-top tessellation because they knew it hurt AMD cards more than their own. They even went as far as encouraging hidden, highly tesselated textures in games to do this. Such as full oceans under the ground, or highly tesselated hair being rendered on bald people, then turning the opacity down to make it invisible. All while still crushing performance.
More recently, Nvidia had the GeForce Partner Programme. Basically, Nvidia was trying to strong-arm partners into essentially giving ownership of their branding to Nvidia, and banning them from using it with AMD products. Also banning branding AMD stuff as for gaming.
E.g. under this scheme, Asus might only be allowed to use their "ROG" branding on Nvidia products, and they wouldn't be allowed to have "Gaming" on their AMD products.
Failure to join the GPP meant losing first access to GPUs, having less time to prepare for new launches, and worse pricing on GPUs bought from Nvidia.
(Fortunately, though 2 OEMs joined GPP, public outcry killed it)
Or how about Nvidia telling Hardware Unboxed and other reviewers that if they didn't give Nvidia positive reviews, they'd fuck the channel over?
Nvidia has done a lot of anticompetitive stuff.
The irony of getting schooled on anticompetitive behavior by TheGrandNagus himself.
You misunderstand, I'm applauding Nvidia here - Jensen Huang would make an excellent ferengi
He has the lobes for business!
ಠ_ಠ
Maybe Quark should've left your wrinkly ass in the Wormhole after all.
Thanks after reading this sober it makes sense.
According to this article, NVidia has a 80% market share over Discrete GPUs. https://wccftech.com/nvidia-retained-80-discrete-gpu-market-share-amd-20-in-q2-2022-despite-gaming-revenue-losses/
That certainly count as monopoly (wonder how igpu goes, but I’ll guess it’s AMD’s who’s first).
Plus they tried to buy ARM recently.
And in France, it’s not monopoly that’s illegal, but company in such situation have more legal restriction due to their potential bad influence on the market compared to smaller companies.
Intel, more likely.
I get that but how’s that a monopoly? They own the market share cause of the product and performance of said product. They aren’t buying companies to boost their share, they failed the arm deal, and from what I’ve read aren’t keeping companies tied to their product. Chatgpt, Microsoft and others can use other hardware. When we look at other monopoly cases it’s due to a forced take over if the market like Microsoft or the current Amazon case. I’m not defending Nvidia outright, but I’m not seeing how a company who produces a better product is at fault of a monopoly.
iOS has almost 60% market share, are they a monopoly cause people choose them as well?
A "better product" is only better by comparison to what the compitetion can do. It's bold to assume that they make better because they are fairly better when Nvidia have a history of doing shady or unhanded tactics in a totally healthy market with 3 competitors.
A monopoly is not necessarily connected to takeover of other companies to grow, so yes, they can be a monopoly. Also, iOS might have that market share in the US, but there are plenty of other markets dominated by Android. And lastly, 80% is a significantly larger market share than 60%, obviously.
When you actively undermine your competitors and abuse your market position.
And iOS is another player who is another great example why monopolies must be broken. They don't play nice, all their apps are not present on other OSs, don't forget the patent lawsuits at the beginning, the proprietary charging port, etc.
Does iOS actually have 60 percent market share, outside of the US?
Android is ahead in most other countries. 70% worldwide
Well... Actually, monopoly is used in French for things that isn’t stricly speaking the sole actor (sorry). There are concurrence (mostly in the form of AMD and Intel in the PC DGPU market, and others in phone/mobile GPUs).
And for mobile operating system, they would count as a duopoly. Aside of IOS and Android, there isn’t much (thought Android is a bit special by the fact it can be reused by other vendors without the google-specific parts).
Actually, maybe the DGPU market could be seen as a triopoly (not much choice beside Intel, AMD and NVidia).
(and if we don’t use the term of monopoly, we can still say for sure they are the main provider of DGPU, which is very likely to cause competition issue)
EU competition law is about not having a single company dominate the market.