The 2009 legal nightmare continues for Intel as just six months after being fined a massive €1.06 billion by the European Commission, it is now taken to court in the US too on antitrust charges. Today New York's attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo filed a complaint against Intel claiming that the number one microprocessor manufacturer has violated state and federal anti-monopoly laws by engaging in illegal actions in order to maintain its monopoly power and prices in the market for microprocessors.

According to Cuomo's complaint, the last few years have seen Intel offering computer makers billions of dollars in 'rebates' in exchange for agreements to use only its CPUs and not those of main rival, AMD. Apparently, Intel also threatened to and punished PC builders that were thought to be working with its competitors. The 'penalties' included cutting off payments the PC makers received from Intel, directly funding the manufacturers' competitors, and ending joint development ventures.

"Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market," said Attorney General Cuomo. "Intel's actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitors, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices. These illegal tactics must stop and competition must be restored to this vital marketplace."

Intel is said to have paid Dell no less than $2 billion in rebates in 2006 alone, and to have granted the company a privileged position over other PC makers in order to not adopt AMD's CPUs for its products.

Dell arch-rival, HP also received hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates but for capping company sales of AMD-based products at 5% of its business desktop PCs. HP was also threatened by Intel with the derailment of its server development if it wouldn't slow down the promotion of AMD products.

As for another major player, IBM, it was threatened to not promote AMD-powered servers, but also got a cool, cool but illegal, $130 million from Intel to not release AMD servers.

To read the complaint against Intel in full click here (PDF file).