
Qualcomm Tumbles After Losing U.S. Antitrust Ruling - jweir
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-22/qualcomm-shares-drop-after-company-loses-u-s-antitrust-ruling
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skunkworker
So Qualcomm would be forced to have more oversight and accountability that
they are playing fair. I’m all for that with a company who has standard
essential patents.

~~~
simonh
It also potentially opens up Qualcomm to litigation by licensees that have
over-paid.

Of course the Apple law suit is the first thing that springs to mind. Apple
alleged harm very much along the lines of that described in this judgement.
They probably settled because Intel wasn't able to supply modems for their
next Phone and they couldn't wait any longer to cut a deal with Qualcomm
without risking their roadmap. However, this judgement might re-open a window
for them to sue again.

~~~
tooltalk
>They probably settled because Intel wasn't able to supply modems for their
next Phone

I'm very unconvinced that they settled because of 5G or Intel. Apple plotted
the world-wide regulatory attacks, the FTC's lawsuit in the Northern District
of California, and the pending class-action lawsuit at least two or three
years ago. Further, most wireless carriers won't even launch 5G until much
later this year, with national wide coverage starting in late 2020 (most
likely later). And Apple couldn't wait a couple of weeks? That doesn't make
any sense.

It's most likely Apple knew they had very low chance of winning outside Lucy
Koh's court in the Norther District of California. It was no coincidence that
the FTC went shopping around for forum in Apple's backyard. They didn't
however foresee the gov't shutdown early this year that delayed Koh's decision
and now Apple was walking into QCOM's den in the Southern District empty
handed. So the choice was fairly clear: wait for Koh's decision which might
not arrive on time, then settle, or fight QCOM. The latter option carries a
lot of risk since, in addition to most likely adverse outcome, Apple's
unsavory, embarrassing legal or supply-practices would be exposed (ie,
potential lawsuits from investors).

~~~
arcticbull
IMO if Apple knew it was 'weeks away' they would have waited to settle,
because they would have had the upper hand.

These kinds of big patent litigations are a bidirectional game of chicken.
It's possible Apple flinched and settled; they could have anticipated a loss.
On the other hand, Apple could well have obtained steep discounts on their 5G
modem orders from Qualcomm as part of the settlement to compensate them for
their troubles. I think it's hard to speculate on what actually happened
without more information.

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ksec
FOSS Patents [1] has blogged about it, although I believe the site tends to be
a little Pro Apple in its narrative ( And that is speaking as someone who like
Apple ), it does provide a decent summary.

[1] [http://www.fosspatents.com/2019/05/breaking-news-federal-
tra...](http://www.fosspatents.com/2019/05/breaking-news-federal-trade-
commission.html)

~~~
wyldfire
> "Qualcomm’s royalty rates are unreasonably high" (Section G). That holding
> will hurt Qualcomm, though it's common sense. They simply charge a lot more
> than the rest of the industry--from the perspective of some major OEMs, more
> than the rest of the industry combined.

Gee, I don't know: if their modem is superior, then why shouldn't they get
superior share of the market? That's not anticompetitive if they make a better
product. BTW if they capture the majority share then it's totally expected
that they should get "more than the rest of the industry combined."

~~~
gvb
Alternate quote from the judge: “Qualcomm’s licensing practices have strangled
competition” in certain modem chip markets “for years, and harmed rivals, OEMs
and end consumers in the process”.

Strangling competition and harming rivals is how you (illegally) get and
maintain a superior share of the market.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
It's not illegal if they're not found guilty.

And even if they're found guilty, if punishment is .0001% (or some other
laughable minuscule percentage) of their revenue, its not a punishment - it's
a cost of doing business.

~~~
comex
> It's not illegal if they're not found guilty.

...which they just were. That’s the point of the article.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
And please read the second part of my statement.

If the punishments are minuscule, it'll just be a cost of doing business. Or
better yet, there may be no fines at all.

What happened with Yahoo? Equifax? Mariott? Adult Friend Finder? Target? eBay?

Each of those has hundreds of millions of people involved in massive breaches.
Do they still exist? Were they fined appropriately for the impact they caused?

(Admittedly Yahoo isn't the best of examples, because they were in a downslide
with no good market. But nor were they fined for a breach of every account.)

~~~
comex
I’m not sure why you’re bringing up data breaches, which are totally unrelated
to antitrust law. Data breaches are also difficult to sue over in the US, as
there’s no law specifically requiring companies to implement security measures
or imposing penalties for being breached, although some lawsuits based on
common law “reasonable care” claims have gone forward [1].

Anyway, in this case, it looks like the FTC did not seek monetary relief (not
sure why), but they sought and received an injunction basically ordering
Qualcomm to stop doing what they were doing, with compliance and monitoring
procedures to enforce it. That’s not as dramatic as a financial penalty would
have been, but the stock hit suggests that Qualcomm nevertheless will suffer
as a result.

[1] [https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2019/03/06/the-
ris...](https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2019/03/06/the-rise-of-
cyber-negligence-claims-plaintiffs-find-receptive-judges-by-going-back-to-
basics/)

------
totalZero
This is the right ruling. These guys are the biggest IP bullies out there in
tech. Their entire business model depends on it.

~~~
umvi
"Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers"

But seriously, Qualcomm is the worst company ever to work with (except maybe
Oracle). They are like a gorilla - they won't budge no matter how hard you
push. Every little thing costs licensing money - from documents to tooling. We
have a Qualcomm SoC for my current project, and support is abysmal.

They put in a minimal effort to provide support and only after you've
completed the onerous requirements to submit a support ticket. It involves
retrieving tons of dumps and logs and such using their various Q-tools (which
are very buggy and half-baked; many of them cost $25k+/year to license). Most
of the time they'll just shrug and say "works on our setup" and refuse to
help. We'll spend hundreds of man-hours debugging their crap until we find the
issue in their kernel driver and then they won't even acknowledge it was a
problem and will say "qmi_wwan is an open source driver. We do not support
it." Right, so you expect _everyone else_ to maintain and fix the bugs in
qmi_wwan even though virtually ALL of your customers use it and you yourselves
rely on it as a critical piece of your development platform. Good one,
Qualcomm.

~~~
Scoundreller
Do you ever point out some terrible design decision and they reply “working as
designed” and then do nothing?

~~~
umvi
The thing is - their software quality is very poor from what I've seen.
1000-line switch-statements with tons of DRY violations, that kind of thing.

But they are really good at testing. They will make darn sure their software
works under their extremely narrow and fragile definition of a test platform.

If you deviate from their test platform _at all_ , you can kiss support
goodbye.

"Oh, you are using Linux 4.X to talk to our chip? Nope, no support, we
specified Linux 3.19 in the test setup, you are on your own."

What sucks is that our platform involves a lot of different vendors - a
Marvell SoC, a Qualcomm SoC, etc. All the other vendors will work with you.

But with Qualcomm it's their way or the highway. They know they can get away
with that behavior.

~~~
throwaway2048
Its still such a shame that a company as belligerent and unfriendly as
Qualcomm bought out the best, most forthcomming and friendly WIFI vendor,
Atheros.

Predictably, months after the acquisition, all atheros documentation
initiatives were killed, and their new generation of chipset requires a
gigantic closed source blob that barely functions, with an absolute minimum of
functionality (you cant even change the MAC address!)

------
gniv
"Qualcomm Inc. shares fell the most in more than two year"

That's technically correct, but misleading. The stock is still 20% higher than
it was on April 15, 2019. (57 then, 69 now).

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jokoon
What's the most powerful foss microcontroller/soc? I guess there are very
little incentives to build powerful foss chips, or maybe it's too expensive?

I guess that's due to the tooling used around building the physical chip?

I don't know how much r&d money was spent on the rpi since the chip is
proprietary, and if it's doable to spend money to develop a foss soc.

~~~
swiley
FOSS as in the BSP? Freescale’s chips tend to be decent (we’ll see how long
that lasts now that Qualcomm owns them.) although I don’t think most of them
have modems or GPUs.

I liked TI’s stuff but it’s definitely not meant for anything like a modern
smart phone.

If you meant the SOC itself... I haven’t even heard of any outside of some
fringe kickstarter things.

~~~
klohto
Qualcomm doesn’t own Freescale. Freescale got bought by NXP and the
acquisition by Qualcomm didn’t came through, so it’s still owned by NXP.

By the way, Freescale doesn’t exist anymore and the chips that are still
avail. are reaching EOL

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thrower123
I can't think of Qualcomm without remembering when it rocketed insanely high
back before the dot com crash. My dad had inherited a tiny bit of money about
then and put some of it in the stock market; I got really into watching the
business news after school for a while. Unfortunately he left it in a little
too long.

~~~
sockpuppet999
Those were heady days. My wife worked there at that time . One day she told me
we were millionaires, I blew it off. A few days later she has documentation
and it seems that we are MULTI millionaires just thru options she was granted
. That was a wonderful windfall. Very unexpected as well. I've followed the
company very closely for reasons I stated above and it took a downfall when
Irwin stepped down and handed the reins to his son. That's about the time the
H1b really started taking off and qcom took advantage of that, wages fell and
although I do know some ppl still there writing Java the newcomers did the job
cheaper and qcom started to rot from the inside. They always had thier patents
on display as anyone who ever walked into the main office will tell you. I
don't blame them for using the legal system to enforce thier patents. I'm sure
you would have done the same thing although thier hiring a bunch of ppl from
overseas really hurt American Engineers, it helped a bunch of American lawyers

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anthuman
Fans of volatility must love QCOM. Jumps on the favorable apple ruling a few
weeks ago and a few weeks later falls on this ruling.

~~~
tooltalk
Let's not forget about the Huawei ban, less than a week ago!

You need a ball of steel to trade in this stock.

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latte_machiato
Great. Qualcomm is a law company, not a tech company. We need less of these
with power.

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blu42
It's ok, the oval office might eventually back them on the international
markets..

