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Qualcomm Fined Record $773 Million In Taiwan Antitrust Probe (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the latest-blow dept.

According to Bloomberg, Qualcomm was fined a record NT$23.4 billion ($773 million) by Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission in the latest blow from regulators over the way the U.S. company prices mobile phone chips and patents. From the report: The company has been violating antitrust rules for at least 7 years and Qualcomm collected NT$400 billion in licensing fees from local companies during that time, the Taiwanese regulator said on its website Wednesday. Qualcomm disagrees with the decision and intends to appeal, the San Diego-based company said in a statement. The Taiwanese regulator said Qualcomm has monopoly market status over key mobile phone standards and by not providing products to clients who don't agree with its conditions, the U.S. company is violating local laws. It said Taiwanese companies had purchased $30 billion worth of Qualcomm baseband chips. Besides the fine, the Fair Trade Commission told Qualcomm to remove previously signed deals that force competitors to provide price, customer names, shipment, model name and other sensitive information as well as other clauses in its agreements.

23 comments

  1. Re:Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    -1 Your mom is an abuse of the system

  2. Re: Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    If you want a free market, how about we go for broke? No government protection of patents, no government protection of copyrights, no government subsidies, no special allowances and rules at all.

    What's that? Qualcomm really wants their government provided monopolies? Well, that's a shame.

  3. Re: Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The dial button on mobile and the slider in classic lets you view low rated messages. It's only when you start putting Scientology texts into comments that they remove your post.

    Also: fuck Qualcomm

  4. Re:Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Moderation is NOT a tool to voice agreement or disagreement

    Oh, you must be new here.

  5. Re:Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    -1

  6. Slap on the wrist as usual by Bruce66423 · · Score: 2

    Oh well, better than nothing.

    1. Re:Slap on the wrist as usual by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cost of doing business. Pay 5% of it as a fine for illegal activities, leaves 95% profit.

    2. Re:Slap on the wrist as usual by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why couldn't they just make key Qualcomm patents void instead of these bullshit fines... Money means nothing, patents and other immaterial property is the new money.

  7. Re: Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And no deductions. You don't want government involvement, you pay flat 10% of revenues, not profits... bottom line is your problem.

  8. Re:Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by radarskiy · · Score: 1

    Why do you hate Adam Smith?

  9. Re:Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by viperidaenz · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I totally agree.
    The government shouldn't be providing Qualcomm with exclusive rights to their patents. That kind of regulation harms other businesses and consumers.
    There wouldn't be any antitrust issues if there was no monopoly on ideas.

  10. Re: Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Modding down lies is not abuse.
    Modding down pretentious statements like your FP isn't abuse either.

    Either support your claim or don't, but don't tell us WTF to do.

  11. Backdoor to get tax money. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes this is the correct way to get all the tax that these huge companies have avoided paying and frisked to Ireland in the form of royalties. Hope some of the fined money goes back to purchasers of phone who have recipts.

    1. Re:Backdoor to get tax money. by Hal_Porter · · Score: 0

      A lot of those big US companies are run by Irish Americans though. For example

      FB - Mark "Blarney" Zuckerberg
      Amazon - Jeff "Shillelagh" Bezos
      Google - Eric "Guinness" Schmidt
      Apple - Tim "Craic" Cook

      I'm sure they're basing their decision on a desire to go back to the mother country for a bit of the old craic and guinness and not on the fact that Ireland only charged Apple and effective corporate tax rate of 0.005% in 2014

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    2. Re:Backdoor to get tax money. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Head over to your mailbox, they're be a check for a whole $0.60 inside.

  12. Is there really any competition on CDMA yet? by deviated_prevert · · Score: 1
    Is Intel just playing a game with Qualcomm? OR will Apple sue Samsung again in the US over some more bullshit function patents with both Intel and Qualcomm cheer leaders in the background ready to doggy hump the judge and pile on if Apple succeeds? At least Taiwan is getting some bucks back out of the jerks considering the fact that chip production in Taiwan is on a downswing because of Apple slowly switching chips.

    Qualcomm getting into manufacturing instead of just farming out their designs was a step that they might regret if Apple gets pissed enough with Qualcomm and switches over completely. Stay tuned slashdotters the 2018 iPhone will most likely have an intel inside sticker on it. What would be even more amazing is if somehow suddenly Nokia came back to life with Microsoft putting the bill to buy out all the unused Qualcomm production capacity in Taiwan. Stranger things have happened. Who knows we might even see a really great Nokia Android phone with secure MS office, sql and exchange. Life will could get very difficult for the MS, Android and Apple fanboys they would all feel like somehow they were forced into a sex change operation without consent.

    --
    This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
    1. Re:Is there really any competition on CDMA yet? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      An Intel inside iPhone would be an interesting development.

      Asus made Atom based phones for a while and they were really cheap, mainly because Intel had a complicated deal where Intel paid various expenses to offset the cost of the chips. So the net cost of an Atom chip to Asus was low and may even have been negative (I've heard -$40 per device).

      Asus didn't sell many phones and switched over to Qualcomm. And still don't sell many phones.

      Atom has come on quite a bit since then - out of order execution for example. And Intel have lower power chips. And of course an Arm licence.

      I could see Intel doing some extensive efforts to get Apple to use their devices - a custom core perhaps and very extensive co-branding and co-marketing.

      It's basically the opposite version of the rumour that Apple would do an Arm based laptop. Actually they didn't, but the iPad Pro is Arm based and you can buy an external keyboard for it.

      https://www.apple.com/shop/buy...

      I reckon Apple are doing well enough with their A10X that they wouldn't want to use a third party application CPU, though they'll use third party modems.

      I could see them releasing a low end laptop with a low power Intel chip though. Something thinner and less power hungry than the Macbook Air.

      But a phone based on an Intel x64 or ARM chip? I'm sceptical. I think they'd be more likely to do an AMD CPU and GPU laptop. Or an Intel/NVidia one.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    2. Re:Is there really any competition on CDMA yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Asus made Atom based phones for a while and they were really cheap, mainly because Intel had a complicated deal where Intel paid various expenses to offset the cost of the chips. So the net cost of an Atom chip to Asus was low and may even have been negative (I've heard -$40 per device).

      But a phone based on an Intel x64 or ARM chip? I'm sceptical. I think they'd be more likely to do an AMD CPU and GPU laptop. Or an Intel/NVidia one.

      I had one of those Asus Atom based phones. I don't know what was it but it appeared faster/snappier than the Qualcomm ARM based phone I have now. Battery life was also really good - at least as good. I was actually very surprised.

      The only thing that sucked about the phone was that it came with bunch of preloaded crap on it but that is Asus' fault.

      It really is too bad that Intel has killed Atom line.

    3. Re:Is there really any competition on CDMA yet? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      It really is too bad that Intel has killed Atom line.

      They've killed off the name 'Atom' for netbooks and I'm not sure they're launching any more phone SKUs, but the Atom microarchitecture lives on

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      https://www.anandtech.com/show...

      For the moment at least, Intel is out of the SoC side of the smartphone market. This will allow ARM architecture based SoCs to absorb the remaining market share they didn't have already.

      What's less clear at the moment is whether this will also impact the low-cost/non-premium tablet market, as embodied by products such as the Surface 3. In their updated statement, Intel has told us that Broxton is cancelled for both "phones and tablets." Our current understanding is that Broxton is the SoC at the heart of the Willow Trail platform - the successor to the widely used Cherry Trail-T - but at this time Intel has not explicitly confirmed whether this is in fact Willow Trail, or if Broxton's tablet variation represented another platform altogether. Though regardless of what happens with traditional tablets, we'll continue see Intel in more premium tablet-like devices such as 2-in-1s (e.g. Surface Pro) via Apollo Lake and the Core processor lineup, as Intel has previously identified convertable devices as a growth market for the company.

      Update 5/02: In a newer statement, Intel has confirmed that Apollo Lake will be offered to tablet manufacturers. At this point it's not clear what the tradeoffs are for that versus Willow Trail, and whether Apollo Lake is suitable for all types of devices that the current-generation Cherry Trail has been used in. But this does mean we will see tablets using the Goldmont CPU core, while Intel Intel will flesh out the rest of their tablet SoCs with Core-based parts. Intel will also "continue to support" their tablet customers with Bay Trail, Cherry Trail, and SoFIA parts.

      Also not discussed in greater detail is Intel's future plans for their overall Atom lineup. With Apollo Lake announced just earlier this month, it's clear that Intel's Atom efforts have not been cancelled entirely. We will still see the new 14nm Goldmont cores appear in low-cost PCs under Apollo Lake, most likely in several 11-to-13 inch high volume devices. However for the moment there is not an Atom core on Intel's roadmap beyond Goldmont.

      Is it cancelled? Yeah, kinda. On the other hand I bet if Apple said "Hey Intel, we'd like to launch a phone with an Apollo Lake successor in it" I'm sure they could uncancel it.

      The problem was that the Asus business wasn't really a business because Intel didn't make any money out of it. So in the absence of a real customer I think they'll keep launching Atom microarchitectures but only produce SKUs for the markets that make money.

      E.g. I bet they sell embedded/low end netbook/low power server Atom SoCs.

      The odd thing is is Microsoft hadn't fucked up mobile/desktop convergence you could have had a device like the Nokia Communicator running a version of Windows based on the desktop kernel. So you'd able to unfold the clamshell and run desktop apps. Or keep it closed and press buttons on the cover to phone people.

      E.g. imagine a device like this that could run desktop apps

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      And was based on a Goldmont core.

      I'd have bought one.

      Sadly of course Windows Mobile couldn't run desktop applications. In fact it couldn't even run Win32 applications cross compiled for Arm (i.e. WIndows Mobile ones) but only Metro Apps. Which no one wrote.

      So we all ended up running Android. Of course now the value of desktop Windows applications has pretty much ceased for most people - they can do most things on other OSs.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    4. Re:Is there really any competition on CDMA yet? by deviated_prevert · · Score: 1

      An Intel inside iPhone would be an interesting development.

      Already happening. Fortune

      Intel is working on much more than that and is trying hard to break into the phone market in a really big way, not just with atom based arch. Even though they have been out of the running for 16 years it seems this time they are coming back and are really looking for the brainz this time. Like I said either they are paying Qualcomm to not sue them or we might see a major tech merger. Say perhaps Qualcomm and Intel in a joint venture with a mind to squash Samsung once and for all?

      Either way there are interesting times ahead in the cell chip sector and there will be blood on the floor with the introduction of the new high end Note by Samsung. The iPhone 8 has some serious competition this time around and I think Apple knows it. If the new 8 series from Samsung starts to take over a huge section of the market the way the original galaxy did you can bet the bullshit American protectionist law suits will fly again. Like the Boeing bombers now flying over Quebec Canada the tariff(s) on Samsung phones will be enormous.

      --
      This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
  13. Re: Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In a truly free market, patents wouldn't exist.

  14. Re:Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Free markets do not exist. Even when you think something is a free market, there will be non-free bullshit hiding behind it. Patents and copyrights are not free market. They are against free market.