Excellent!

I have a Dell widescreen monitor (pretty good it is too). Where do I write to in order to get my partial refund?

Oh, wait, this is just to line governmental pockets and not actually assist the ripped-off consumer? Dammit.

@Alan Lukaszewicz

This was a fine, not a damages payment. The government gets the money.

Not as simple as it looks

Price fixing may be evil, but it's not always the fixer who is the root of the problem. The closer you look at this sort of stuff, the less clear it is who is the good guy and who the bad. Dell's distribution unfairly controlling the market price - manufacturers price fixing in order to survive; lawyers making a name for themselves regardless of who gets hurt.

It's all a matter of who has the greater power in negotiations - are LCD's being sold to Dell, or is distribution being sold to the manufacturer. Just as Tesco can say to a supplier - if you want your biscuits on our shelves, you're going to have to give us lower prices than anyone else - so can Dell. It may not be so much little Dell being tricked into overpaying for LCD's as the LCD makers trying not to sell at a loss. If a supplier of the latest LCD's has invested billions in the latest generation of production facility, his hands are tied - he must recover his investment by keeping his lines running while prices are still high. Along comes Dell and says - we'll take your entire production, so you don't need to charge a high price. Then Dell sells for a market leading, but extremely profitable price worldwide which undercuts every other brand. If excess supply turns up, Dell can simply dump it on the market at cost. Meanwhile, other manufacturers are not running at full capacity, and need to charge even higher prices to survive. It's very easy to see how price fixing becomes a matter of survival for manufacturers, and that Dell isn't a manufacturer, but a distributor.

We saw this with the first 24 inch LCD's 3-4 years ago. Dell had the best product and the best price. But from time to time you could buy at almost half that price, direct, on ebay or via numerous online resellers as Dell simply turned 90 days of supplier credit on the excess supply into cash.

The commoditization of everything Dell sells means that Dell's channel has currently lost this power. You can see the results in the share price - one fifth of what it was in Dell's glory days, despite increased sales.