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US Antitrust Agency Sues Qualcomm Over Patent Licensing (reuters.com)
Qualcomm shares have plunged after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against the company on Tuesday, accusing the company of using "anticompetitive" tactics to maintain its monopoly on a key semiconductor used in mobile phones. Reuters reports: The FTC, which works with the Justice Department to enforce antitrust law, said that San Diego-based Qualcomm used its dominant position as a supplier of certain phone chips to impose "onerous" supply and licensing terms on cellphone manufacturers and to weaken competitors. Qualcomm said in a statement that it would "vigorously contest" the complaint and denied FTC allegations that it threatened to withhold chips in order to collect unreasonable licensing fees. In its complaint, the FTC said the patents that Qualcomm sought to license are standard essential patents, which means that the industry uses them widely and they are supposed to be licensed on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. The FTC complaint also accused Qualcomm of refusing to license some standard essential patents to rival chipmakers, and of entering into an exclusive deal with Apple Inc. The FTC asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose to order Qualcomm to end these practices.
Ummmm... No, nevermind.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Qualcomm holds patents in all kinds of things. In 5G, it holds Standards Essential Patents in the Radio Access Network (RAN), modulation & waveforms, and core networking.
In RAN, centimetre wave (10GHz-30GHz) and millimetre wave (30GHz-300GHz) radio, beam steering or beamforming techniques, and massive MIMO IP are held by Nokia, Ericsson and Qualcomm.
In modulation, 5G requires non-orthogonal transmission schemes, rather than the OFDM of LTE-Advanced. Some schemes under consideration include Filter-Bank Multi-Carrier (FBMC) transmission, Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC) transmission and Generalised Frequency-Division Multiplexing (GFDM).
In networking technologies, Network function virtualisation (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN), Inter-Node Coordination and backhaul, Access Link Integration, Self Organising Network (SON) technology, Context Aware Networking, Information Centric Networking, not to mention good old WiFi. Nokia, Qualcomm, Cisco, Intel and Ericsson are the top IP holders.
The people who design the cellular standards are the same people who hold all the patents. Cellular standards are such a mess because everyone wants to get all their patents in the mix somewhere.
> The thing is, the Qualcomm product is demonstrably better than the competing options. It's not even close. ... We can see that right now with the intel chipset iPhones falling flat on their faces compared to the superior Qualcomm iPhones.
You ever think that maybe could be because of "Qualcomm us[ing] its dominant position as a supplier of certain phone chips to impose "onerous" supply and licensing terms on cellphone manufacturers and to weaken competitors." as well as "Qualcomm['s refusal] to license some standard essential patents to rival chipmakers[.]"?
There was a time when you'd pretty much _never_ find an AMD chip in a machine from the Big PC Manufacturers. Not even when AMD (or other manufacturers) had _demonstrably_ superior silicon. And the only PCs with "off-brand" chips you _could_ find were _vastly_ inferior to the Intel versions. Why? Because (as was proven by FedGov) Intel used backroom deals and strong-arm tactics to engage in illegal, anticompetitive behavior which flat-out killed many CPU manufacturers and (for a very long time) kept the prices of CPUs really high, and their performance relatively low. Were it not for FedGov action, Intel would be the _only_ game in town, and you'd be paying $1000 today for a Pentium 3 equivalent.
The term "Free Market" is commonly misunderstood to mean "A marketplace with no regulation". Adam Smith (and many others) recognized that for a market to be _truly_ free, (that is, its prices are set purely by competition on the behalf of sellers and information sharing on the behalf of purchasers, rather than artificial barriers to entry), economic rents _must_ be eliminated. Thus, regulation and government action that removes and prevents the formation of artificial monopolies is _absolutely necessary_ for the existence of a open and competitive market.
Maybe you disagree with Smith. One only needs to look at the sorry state of Internet access in the densely populated urban areas of the US to see how artificial barriers to entry and anticompetitive action result in market stagnation and a poorer result for purchasers.
After microsoft got away with a wristslap after some of the worst antitrust offenses in half a century - the justice department kind of gave up. The US courts had too many free market fundamentalists who tried to legislate their belief that antitrust laws are evil from the bench.
It wasn't always like that. Theodore Rooseveldt (a republican no less) was nicknamed "The Trustbuster" for his aggressive pursuit of antitrust cases - he went hard after them. He once ordered one of the richest men in America to the white house to formally inform him that the slightest breach will see the full might of the law. He made his position very clear: large trusts would be left alone only as long as they played by the rules, but break the antitrust rules and he would shut them the hell down. which was exactly what he did.
A sign of a bygone age - when even republicans understood that you cannot allow the rich to just run roughshod over the population. Both Rooseveldts should be remembered for having very good economic policies and approaches - despite being in different parties. FDR was the one who finally ended the travesty of "Horse and Sparrow" economics which had extended the depression by a decade and is reputed to have said of it "It's a brilliantly honest description of the republicans who pursue their policy, as it outright admits that in their view, the poor are expected to literally eat shit" (similar statement were made by several commentators at the time, including some well-known standup comics of the era, so it's uncertain if FDR ever actually said it himself and if he did he was probably quoting one of them).
Sadly, horse and sparrow economics just wouldn't die, and made it's comeback beginning with Nixon under a new moniker "Trickle down economics". Ironically nobody on the right will admit to believing in it. They point out that the phrase exists in no official policy statements or party platforms and the like... as if that means anything. Sure they don't practise something THEY call "Trickle down" - it's what leftists call the set of policies they practise, policies they most assuredly DO pursue. Unless their going to now start pretending that tax-cuts for the rich and austerity for everybody else is not a persistent republican policy (and the latest republican president-elect has taken that idea to a never-seen-before extreme). His taxplan makes the Bush taxcuts look miserly. Hey, who cares that these policies have NEVER had the predicted outcomes ANYWHERE in the world - have consistently made deficites worse, debts bigger and the people poorer, it MUST surely work THIS time, right ? If at fiftieth you don't succeed and all that...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The thing is, the Qualcomm product is demonstrably better than the competing options...We can see that right now with the intel chipset iPhones falling flat on their faces compared to the superior Qualcomm iPhones.
The Intel modems are inferior, but saying they fall flat on their face is a vast over exaggeration. I have a Zenfone 2 and my wife has a HTC 10. Her Snapdragon 820 is 2 years newer than the XMM 7262 in my phone. The 820 is LTE Cat 12, the 7262 Cat 6, we are both on T-Mobile LTE. I just did a speed test on each phone same place and time, mine got 52 Mb/s down, 27 Mb/s up. Hers gets 89 Mb/s down, 15 Mb/s up. Yeah the 2 years newer Qualcomm chip is better, but if you compare it with the XMM 7480 (same year as the 820) its Cat 9 downlink, Cat 13 uplink. I don't have a XMM 7480, but chances are its pretty close to the 820 and might even be better upload speed. Regardless, a 52 Mb/s connection to my cell phone is pretty damn good, I'm not going to use that bandwidth reading email on my phone.
More importantly, it is imperative that Intel, Mediatek, etc. continue to invest in modems and challenge Qualcomm. Most of us remember the consequences of a tech monopoly and don't want it to happen again. I know its almost a sin on /. but I'm rooting for Intel to keep getting big design wins like the iPhone. There used to be a lot more players in the modem market... most of them have dropped out now. We need the retain the few that are left.
Qualcomm has patents on actual products, technologies, and methods they have developed. The view of the Federal government is that they are in violation of anti-trust laws.
Yet, Apple who had patents on flat rectangular device, gride arrangement of icons, etc. Gets billions of dollars for having absolutely zero technology infringed. Go figure....