Remember that €1.06 billion antitrust lawsuit that Intel was slapped with by the European Commission back in 2009? It's ok if you don't, but it involved Intel being accused of "market malpractice, by influencing computer hardware manufacturers to postpone and/or cancel launches of their products that use CPUs made by its rival AMD" based on our own reporting from 2009. As these thing goes, Intel appealed to a higher court and that higher court handed back the case to the lower court who has now withdrawn the fine and the judges went as far as to say "The (European) Commission's analysis is incomplete and does not make it possible to establish to the requisite legal standard that the rebates at issue were capable of having, or likely to have, anticompetitive effects,".

The European Commission has said it will study the new judgement and will consider its next steps, but it seems unlikely that they'll be able to bring this case to court again, without some additional proof of wrongdoing. The end result of this is also likely to make it tougher to bring cases like to court in the future for the European Commission, as they will have to provide more detailed cases where they prove that things like MDF and rebates to their customers cause real, anti-competitive damages to other companies in the same line of business, in this case AMD. The case can still be appealed to the CJEU, so this 13 year saga might still not be over.