Beware of the bundle
Back in the summer Intel announced it was hoping to acquire security software giant McAfee. Quite rightly, when one tech giant intends to acquire another, this drew the attention of competition authorities.
Half a year later the European Commission has found time in its busy schedule to approve the deal, subject to a couple of conditions being met.
The major concern of the Commission was that Intel might use its dominant position in the PC chip market to bundle McAfee with its chips, and thus prevent competition in the security software market.
The concessions Intel made to these concerns centre around it promising to ensure there will be no preferential treatment to McAfee in terms of the ‘functionalities' of Intel's CPUs and chipsets. Equally it won't hamper the running of McAfee on competitor's chips.
"The commitments submitted by Intel strike the right balance, as they allow preserving both competition and the beneficial effects of the merger. These changes will ensure that vigorous competition is maintained and that consumers get the best result in terms of price, choice and quality of the IT security products," said Commission VP Joaquín Almunia.
Clearly it would be anticompetitive for Intel to afford McAfee an advantage in running on its chips, but the issue of bundling doesn't seem to have been fully addressed here.
If future CPUs are sold with McAfee integrated into the silicon, and thus provide comprehensive anti-virus, firewall, etc, what reason would there be to buy another security product? You could argue this is already the case with Microsoft's free security suite, but it doesn't come pre-bundled to the best of our knowledge.
