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Nvidia offices raided by French competition authority (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[-] Tibert@jlai.lu 144 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For people not knowing French, the Nvidia offices were not raided by heavily armed forces, with guns or whatever shooting.

"Perquisition" is just some cops/people coming and getting into your stuff or taking it for analysis. It's like a search in Nvidia's stuff/software/internal communications. It required a warrant given by a judge.

[-] thorcik@lemmy.world 105 points 1 year ago

Were they looking for the latest Linux drivers?

[-] magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 18 points 1 year ago

They're gonna need bigger guns then.

[-] qyron@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 year ago

Still didn't found that piece of software

[-] Maalus@lemmy.world 49 points 1 year ago

You just described a raid...

[-] Tibert@jlai.lu 33 points 1 year ago

Some people may see it in some other way.

[-] Obi@sopuli.xyz 24 points 1 year ago

I think it's only in French that we associate raid with "all guns blazing" because we use the English word for cool action movies and the French one for boring news segments.

[-] gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 1 year ago

it's not only in French. The word raid is quite connotated with an armed police raid, at least in non native speakers.

[-] Obi@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah that makes sense, probably for similar reasons right?

[-] gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

not sure if it is only because of the movies. Even in the (world) news that you may read online it is much more often to read in the headlines of a violent armed police raid than service workers walking in to get the accounting books. So I guess it could also be that we've never seen or used this word in another context.

[-] Obi@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah the movies are just an example but indeed also in the news they'll use raid for when the armed police kicks the door down but perquisition for the boring ones. It's just what the words mean at this point, I guess back in the days it was "perquisition armée" (armed).

[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago

Maybe I'm too American raised in too much cop movies but a raid always comes off like body armor, armor piercing rounds of ammo, and flash bangs.

So I kinda need it explained like this.

[-] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago

I think it mostly has that connotation but a bunch of feds showing up unexpectedly at an office to confiscate the books and computers before they can shred/delete data I'd still call a raid.

[-] Discoslugs@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Raids in america involve guns swat teams and often phantom warrants.

[-] Pxtl@lemmy.ca 40 points 1 year ago

This is a problem with the US news in general because it uses the words "raid" and "execute search warrant on" as synonyms, when the former conjures up images of guys in body-armor with carbines and the latter a couple of cops and a bunch of specialized investigators. Like, various layers of US government have "raided" many of Trump's properties, and obviously it was the latter and not the former, it's not like Trump is gonna get the Breonna Taylor service.

[-] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Also, just to be absolutely clear, no neighbours were shot, or anything of the sort.

[-] Smokeydope@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

People are more likely to click on exciting headlines that play up drama, its like clickbait 101. "Nvidia office was searched" may be a more accurate realistic description but not super exciting. When I see 'raid' I think of SWAT teams busting up drug cartel homebases.

[-] Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 48 points 1 year ago

linus-torvalds-nvidia.gif

[-] SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 year ago

That was an IMAX experience

[-] Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

This one weird trick to have all your gifs play exactly at the users current brain resolution.

[-] autotldr 29 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Nvidia’s France offices were raided by the country’s competition authority this week, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

While the French agency doesn’t mention Nvidia by name, it confirms it carried out a raid over concerns about anti-competitive practices in the graphics cards industry.

Sources tell the WSJ that French authorities specifically targeted Nvidia, which has seen demand for its chips skyrocket in recent months.

According to the WSJ, these types of raids occur early in the morning and have authorities “search a company’s premises, seize physical and digital materials and interview employees who arrive for work.” The French authority says it conducted the raid as part of its increased scrutiny on cloud technology, a topic the agency published a market study on in June.

A machine-translated version of the French agency’s press release says that dawn raids “do not pre-suppose the existence of a breach of the law,” which is something “only a full investigation” can establish.

However, a raid could suggest that Nvidia’s reign in the chipmaking market isn’t going unnoticed by global governments.

The original article contains 257 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 31%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[+] bestnerd@lemmy.world -25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[-] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

The irony of getting schooled on anticompetitive behavior by TheGrandNagus himself.

[-] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

You misunderstand, I'm applauding Nvidia here - Jensen Huang would make an excellent ferengi

He has the lobes for business!

[-] grue@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

ಠ_ಠ

Maybe Quark should've left your wrinkly ass in the Wormhole after all.

[-] bestnerd@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks after reading this sober it makes sense.

[-] marius851000@lemmy.mariusdavid.fr 29 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

(wonder how igpu goes, but I’ll guess it’s AMD’s who’s first).

Intel, more likely.

[+] bestnerd@lemmy.world -19 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] tabular@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] AreaSIX@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] filister@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] NoMoreCocaine@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Does iOS actually have 60 percent market share, outside of the US?

[-] Anafabula@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

Android is ahead in most other countries. 70% worldwide

[-] marius851000@lemmy.mariusdavid.fr 1 points 1 year ago

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)

[-] whitecapstromgard@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 year ago

EU competition law is about not having a single company dominate the market.

this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023

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