The issue at the heart of it is what can be charged for the standard essentials patents which must be licensed in a fair, reasonable and non discriminatory mann

The issue at the heart of it is what can be charged for the standard essentials patents which must be licensed in a fair, reasonable and non discriminatory manner (FRAND). Qualcomm committed to these rules and got in return its patents written into the standard i.e. a monopoly. That is the way the wireless and a lot of other industries have worked - like it or not. What is at the heart of the matter is whether Qualcomm lives up to the FRAND rules. In its Amicus Brief Intel argues (http://blogs.intel.com/policy/files/2017/05/Intel-Amicus-Brief-FILED.pdf http://blogs.intel.com/policy/files/2017/05/Intel-Amicus-Bri...) especially against the no-license no-chip policy: > The Complaint focuses, instead, on Qualcomm’s policy of conditioning its chipset sales on the OEM agreeing that handsets using another vendor’s chipsets be licensed on the terms Qualcomm dictates. But selling Qualcomm chipsets to an OEM plainly does not “assist” that OEM in producing a handset that uses another vendor’s chipset making Qualcomm’s policy unnecessary to avoid “assisting” supposed infringement that Qualcomm is no part of. Qualcomm “assists” an OEM’s sale of handsets using other vendor's chipsets only in the sense that Qualcomm could devastate an OEM completely by cutting off its supply. Imagine Intel insisting that buyers of AMD's chips are following Intel's licensing terms. Qualcomm uses its standard essential patents as power levers. The pricing structure reflects that and is now so out of whack with what is happening elsewhere that Apple now balked. The way Qualcomm yields it power is at the heart of not adhering to FRAND rules. And I somehow doubt that Intel and Samsung gang up here. It was probably a friendly call from a dear customer that got the ball rolling.