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How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

528 points by headalgorithm 7y ago

sundvor 7y ago
Whilst it seems good to break up this market, it also was rather interesting to see Apple whinge about monopolist market behaviour. Pot calling the kettle black; how very hypocritical.
- Veen 7y ago
  In which market does Apple have a monopoly?
  - zeveb 7y ago
    The iPhone app-approval market leaps to mind.
    - Veen 7y ago
      If you mean Apple owns and runs an App Store, then yes, but that’s not a monopoly. It’s just a store that they control. Would you say that their physical stores are a monopoly that they abuse by not selling samsung phones?
      - sundvor 7y ago
        Then why are we seeing eg https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-against-apple-allowing-an-app-store-antitrust-case-to-proceed/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-agains... ? Regardless, their behaviour with their own Dev relations is very much like what they're accusing Qualcomm of.
        rstupek 7y ago
        The supreme court didn't say Apple was a monopoly it said that people could sue them to see if they were.
        Despegar 7y ago
        The Supreme Court didn't rule on the merits of the case. The actual antitrust case is extremely weak against Apple. You'd need a nonsensical market definition to say Apple has monopoly power, and it wouldn't hold up in court.
      - zeveb 7y ago
        > If you mean Apple owns and runs an App Store, then yes, but that’s not a monopoly. They also refuse to permit their customers to run apps not approved by Apple on the phones they have bought. That's the monopoly.
        mason55 7y ago
        Huh? That’s still not a monopoly. Argue that they’re violating anti-consumers laws to have access to device you purchased, sure, but what you’re describing is in no way a monopoly.
        criddell 7y ago
        I think it comes down to how narrow you want to define the market. And even if it is a monopoly, that doesn't mean anything by itself. Monopolies aren't illegal.
        village-idiot 7y ago
        That’s factually false. You can side load apps, plenty of enterprises do it.
        sigstoat 7y ago
        last i looked that requires a couple hundred dollar per year special developer account from apple, with special checks to make sure you're actually a business doing it for business reasons. and they still sign your apps, they just do it automatically, i think.
        village-idiot 7y ago
        So? You can still side load. Developers do it all the time. The approval process is only for distributing your private app to hundreds of people using Apple’s servers and hardware.
        sigstoat 7y ago
      - pier25 7y ago
        The monopoly is that no other software distributor can be used on iOS other than Apple.
        YUMad 7y ago
        That is a monopoly in their own product, not in a market.
        pier25 7y ago
        Doesn't matter, Apple is the only supplier of iOS apps and forbids any competition here.
        conception 7y ago
        LG is the only supplier of apps for their TVs and forbids any competition there.
        pier25 7y ago
        So?
        closetohome 7y ago
        Exactly.
        henryfjordan 7y ago
        So does LG take a 30% rake of all app sales? It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to take advantage of that fact with non-competitive pricing.
        xwdv 7y ago
        This poor understanding of what a monopoly is on your part is a testament to how uncommon true monopolies have become thanks to modern regulation.
      - tracker1 7y ago
        If I want to sell an app to users on iOS, and those users want my app, there's no way for them to get it without Apple. That's a vertical market monopoly. And even if it doesn't qualify as a monopoly in your mind, it can still run afoul of anti-trust law.
        zaroth 7y ago
        If you want to sell a product in Apple’s physical store, there’s no way to do it without Apple. That’s not a monopoly. That’s them exercising control over their own property. What’s the rationale to treat Apple’s digital store different than Apple’s physical store?
        scarface74 7y ago
        You could say the same about console makers. They have been doing the same thing since the 80s....
    - CharlesW 7y ago
      That's like saying McDonald's has a monopoly on what food appears on their menu. It's non-sensical as a complaint.
      - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
        In United States v. Microsoft Corp.[0] it was determined that Microsoft abused monopoly it's power by simply preventing OEMs from removing internet explorer. Apple demands that all web browsing is done via Safari on IOS as I understand it. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
        npunt 7y ago
        Microsoft had a 90%+ market share in computer operating systems, aka a monopoly. So there's that.
        Veen 7y ago
        But Microsoft did have a monopoly in the browser market at that time. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in the browser market or the phone market or the app market. You can’t abuse a monopoly you don’t have.
        mbreese 7y ago
        The monopoly was in the OS market. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to use that monopoly to create a new one in the nascent browser market.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        And Apple has no monopoly. Having a monopoly is a pre-requisite for being found guilty of using a monopoly to leverage your way into an adjacent market. End of story.
        tooltalk 7y ago
        QCOM doesn't have a monopoly in the baseband market either, yet Koh's court found QCOM's monopoly there. The FTC simply redefined a market where QCOM had a dominant marketshare -- the "premium" modem market (LTE) -- for Koh to come to that ruling. So I guess if someone can prove AAPL's dominance in "premium" PC, education, or some niche subgroup in PC market, it too can be in trouble.
  - sundvor 7y ago
    App Store, in their ios ecosystem.
    - Veen 7y ago
      Perhaps you should take a moment to review what a monopoly is.
      - cabaalis 7y ago
        I believe OP is referring to the recent ruling allowing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple's app store to proceed. Not necessarily declared a monopoly yet, but also not declared not one. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18617727/apple-v-pepper-antitrust-illinois-brick-supreme-court-case-loss https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18617727/apple-v-pepper-a...
        sundvor 7y ago
        Yes. My point was that they are exhibiting the same type of behaviour that they're accusing Qualcomm of, and that's why I said that's the pot calling the kettle black; they are more than happy to embrace the same self serving behaviour when it serves them. The app store paid out $34bn to devs last year, so a very simple and probably naive calculation of 34/.7*.3 tells me they pocketed around ~$14.5bn in revenue from a total of $48.5bn. (source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/developer-apos-34-billion-earnings-002422266.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/developer-apos-34-billion-ear... ) That really ought to be big enough a pot to warrant my drawing the parallel. Furthermore, - They have absolute control and will shut down things whenever they want, such as parental control apps - https://www.macworld.com/article/3391361/apple-privacy-parental-control-apps-screen-time.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3391361/apple-privacy-paren... . - They claim you may install alternative apps, yet you may not set them as default handlers to replace Apple's native ones- https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18644045/apple-defends-app-store-policies-antitrust-eu-spotify https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18644045/apple-defends-ap... - They're playing hardball with Spotify, who are also using the word "monopoly": https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18530894/apple-music-monopoly-spotify-app-store-europe https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18530894/apple-music-monop...
guardiangod 7y ago
As a former worker at Blackberry(RIM) cellular chip division (hello fellow RCT-ees), this article explains so much it physically hurts me. RIM pushed hard to develop its own chip 3G/4G chips because Qualcomm absolutely strangled the company with its licensing cost/terms. They pretty much demanded a separate cellular R&D team (QCT) that duplicates half the effort. All CDMA based phones must contain chips from QCT because Qualcomm holds CDMA patents and they won't license them to anyone. Finally, Qualcomm was, while very technically competent, will give you no assistance whatsoever if you deviate from what they want you to do. Basically 'my way or the highway.' Edit: As an aside, my heart goes out to Intel's defunct Infineon-based 5G modem team.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  Did they really 'strangle the company'? Blackberry had a meteroic rise and they collapsed because of iPhone and (later) Android.
  - ansible 7y ago
    That's a good question. Yes, margins are low for most phones, most of the time. And cheaper modem chipsets would help with that. But if everyone had cheaper chipsets... then the phones would be a little cheaper. But I don't think that would have changed the competitive landscape at that time. There was a fundamental change in phone capability and interaction that really shifted the market, and made new winners and losers.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    After reading about it particularly "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry", I think guardiangod is correct, but also Verizon and, to a much lesser extent, the whole stock dating scandal. If Verizon hadn't been so gun-ho for an iPhone killer, Blackberry would probably of got to something like the Passport a whole lot faster. They needed to stay in their lane for a bit longer. Their market cap actually hit its max a year after the iPhone. I wouldn't call RIM / Blackberry a meteroic rise. They start in the mid 90's and built up the products in a pretty smart way with each following the next until the total shift of the Storm.
npunt 7y ago
This article is a good read, adding a lot of context to my understanding of the Qualcomm/Apple spat and it's merits. You can see in the history there were several potential market opportunities that companies were unable to act on due to Qualcomm's behavior.
pier25 7y ago
So why did Apple decide to make its own SOCs but not its own modem chips? I would expect making CPUs and GPUs to be a lot more difficult than modems, no?
- wmf 7y ago
  CPU design and RF stuff are both very difficult; I wouldn't assume one way or the other. I wonder if knowledge of CPU design is more widely dispersed (e.g. you can hire ex-Intel, ex-AMD, ex-IBM people) than cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm.
  - derefr 7y ago
    > cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm. Seems strange, given that plenty of manufacturers are making the radios on the other side of the cellular connection. Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio?
    - bradstewart 7y ago
      What does "redo their tape-outs for phone scale" mean exactly? Can Intel redo their tape-outs to make a Xeon work in a phone? I suspect those high-power radios are not doing the majority of the RF in silicon.
    - guardiangod 7y ago
      Heh, there are various levels of 'working'. Think Windows 9x kernel vs NT kernel. Both kernels 'work'.
    - mschuster91 7y ago
      > Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio? Workable maybe but not power efficient, which is crucial in mobile. That takes years to figure out and is the reason why ARM is so utterly dominant on mobile - there simply is not any Intel x86 offering even close to the power envelope of ARM, even after years of ARM dominance Intel hasn't managed to get anything meaningful.
bsder 7y ago
Is Qualcomm a ruthless monopolist? Yep. But what people forget is that EVERYBODY was knifing one another in that space when CDMA originally came out. The only difference is that Qualcomm is the ruthless monopolist that won. In addition, while I have no love lost for Qualcomm, what you do have to remember is that CDMA was a "bet the farm" moment. If CDMA could be delivered, it was significantly better than what existed at the time. However, there was no promise that a power amplifier could be delivered with the specifications demanded by CDMA--Qualcomm bet that they could. Rockwell had a worldwide monopoly on CDMA power amplifiers for years because they were delivering that amp, and the yield was abysmal. The original Qualcomm stuff was a significant engineering achievement, and, while they probably don't deserve to continue to abuse their position at this point, they certainly deserved some time to profit from their work.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tareqak 7y ago
  What other corporation requires paying to license their patent portfolio in order to be allowed buy their products? I don't have to pay for a license from McDonald's to eat their burger. I'm not an expert in this domain, so there might be more relevant example. Update: fixed up my wording.
  - aspenmayer 7y ago
    You do have to agree to the McDonald's app terms and conditions so you can get its benefits, like skipping the line. You pay twice: first, with money; then, with data.
    - tareqak 7y ago
      You're paying to skip the line using data, but you're not paying for the meal with data. If you could only purchase the meal using the app, then you could make the argument that some part of the meal price could be paid from the data itself. I don't know if there are vending machines that will only sell if you have the relevant app installed first, but I think those come closer. However, unless the terms of service of any of those approaches penalized me for buying a meal at Burger King, then we aren't quite at the same level of scrutiny as opposed to what was reported to have happened in this article.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
davidf18 7y ago
"In recent years, Samsung has often shipped smartphones with its own Exynos chips in some markets, while selling Qualcomm chips in others—particularly the United States and China. It's not clear exactly why it does this, but a reasonable guess is that Samsung believes that it's more vulnerable to Qualcomm's patent threats in those countries." Qualcomm originally had the patents for CDMA (as opposed to GSM) which has a lot of presence in the US and in China but not most of the rest of the world. In years when Apple used both Qualcomm and Intel chips, the Qualcomm chips were for Verizon and Sprint which were CDMA networks before LTE and the Intel chips went to AT&T and T-Mobile which both use GSM.
throw7 7y ago
And congress will do nothing about IP, specifically patents as it relates to this story.
- tracker1 7y ago
  I wish... patent reform on extension patents in particular in addition to a dual sourcing requirement from the FDA would let a more natural market take care of a lot of what's wrong with medications. In general, at this point, I'd love to see the entire patent system dismantled rather than keep what we have.
blunte 7y ago
I find great irony in Qualcomm exercising a monopoly position to take a % of total phone price from Apple... since Apple uses its monopoly position to take a % of all app revenue. What Apple thinks would be fair for Qualcomm chip license fees would also be reasonable for App Store fees.
- kumarvvr 7y ago
  > since Apple uses its monopoly position to take a % of all app revenue Wait. What are you talking about? They own a platform, others want to use that platform to make money, so Apple is charging fees to use their platform. Where is the monopoly part? Developers have other avenues to sell their software on (Android) iOS and Android can be classified as a Duopoly though.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    Duopoly is when the two heterogenous companies coöperate to form a monopoly. That was Wintel. A cartel is when a small number of homogenous companies share the market while ostensibly competing with each other, but coöperate to erect barriers to anyone else getting into the market. If Apple and Google block other companies from getting into the mobile device business, they would be a cartel.
    - Bakary 7y ago
      Did you start using that spelling from reading the New Yorker?
      - braythwayt 7y ago
        Which spelling?
        ncmncm 7y ago
        Probably the diæresis: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-... The "æ" is a whole nother thing.
RobDrk 7y ago
for a counter view by the current FTC commissioner https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust-overreach-11559085055 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust-ov...
RobDrk 7y ago
for a counter view on this from yesterdays WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust-overreach-11559085055 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust-ov... this is by the FTC commissioner (the agency that sued Q)
- asr 7y ago
  Very interesting I had not seen this. Note there are five ftc commissioners. Christine Wilson is one of three republicans. She is unfortunately the one who seems the most trumpian. She misleadingly quotes a filing her own agency made in this op-ed. Because of that, and a few other turns of phrase in here that appear frequently in Qualcomm PR (such as the factually incorrect statement that this case was filed during the Obama administration--it was actually filed under Trump) I'm willing to bet a lot of money Qualcomm wrote this and gave it to her and she signed off on it.
  - RobDrk 7y ago
    it was filed when the last administration was on the way out but still had dem majority. also see the dissent written by one of the commissioner at that time. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/170117qualcomm_mko_dissenting_statement_17-1-17a.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/170117qualc... i feel the ars article is a hit job as is the PR from Q.
    - SmokeGS 7y ago
      I just looked at the FTC government archives from 1919-2009 and there is a gap after 2008 with missing volumes 146-148. https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/commission-decision-volumes https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/commission... Does anyone know why this is the case?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - asr 7y ago
      I just double-checked and you are right! Filed Jan. 17, 2019. Apologies. For some reason I thought it was filed a few days after Trump became president, but I was mis-remembering.
planetsmashr 7y ago
I recently worked with a technical VP at a chip foundry in South Korea. One day Quallcom came up in discussion and he said "Qualcomm are like gangsters in the industry".
- tooltalk 7y ago
  I know this is completely tangential, but just wondering if Apple ever came up in discussion.
  - ddorian43 7y ago
    Apple is the gangster in the hood.
    - sangnoir 7y ago
      What Apple did to/with that glass foundry that went under was straight-up gangster.
      - nasut 7y ago
        And because of that the little glass (actually sapphire) company´s execs are in court for fraud and the little glass company Apple raised from obscurity (Gorilla) is doing pretty well - Right. Gangster
        sangnoir 7y ago
        I might be missing your sarcasm (as they are not 'little'), but are you suggesting that Apple raised the 168 year old, S&P 500 Corning Glass from obscurity?
ncmncm 7y ago
After reading through the comments quarreling about whether Qualcomm and Apple are acting within their rights to charge monopoly-sized rent where they can, and do, it's hard for me to fathom the depths of confusion Americans are reduced to whenever these topics come up. First and foremost: when you are as big as Qualcomm and Apple are in their respective spheres, you don't need rights. You have POWER, which is far, far better, especially when you can use it to extract money to buy more power with. Rights are for little people. Qualcomm has been at this for decades. How long can you get away with just parking your car in the wrong place? Second, when you talk about abuse of monopoly power, it makes no sense to look at it from the standpoint of the monopolist. Everything is stacked in their favor. The important question is, what can the little guy do? Not other companies, even though they complain most effectively (like Apple or Intel complaining about Qualcomm), or even small ones that can't. They would all love to be monopolies too, and sometimes are. What matters is, what is the experience of somebody who got an iPhone for her quinceaña, or of the farmer stuck with a busted John Deere tractor? Each is obliged to pay a huge premium -- for software, or repairs -- because the 400-pound gorilla can force the matter. The fact that somebody else has an Android phone or an IH tractor doesn't help either of them. Each is stuck with what Apple or Deere is willing to let them have. The law doesn't need to define a monopoly: only a monopoly can exercise monopoly power, so it suffices to look for that happening. Any monopoly not visibly abusing its monopoly power has nothing to worry about, because nobody can tell. Anti-trust law doesn't make it illegal to have a monopoly. It just says that if you choose to make one -- and every monopoly chose it -- different rules apply. The law defines lots of rules, but the DOJ has chosen to ignore almost all because of a lately fashionable notion promoted by Chicago-school economists that nothing matters except high prices. Under the law there is a hell of a lot of monopoly abuse nobody at DOJ will even look at, that have all kinds of deleterious results. Anybody who wants to do anything about any of it gets mobbed by defenders of monopolists' rights. And that's where we are today. Qualcomm got in trouble by making things unpleasant for other 400-pound gorillas, and we get to watch. Offenses against us are entirely ignored, and now people insist that's normal and right, law or no law.
- wmf 7y ago
  Offenses against us are entirely ignored... Meanwhile everybody else is saying that US antitrust law is concerned entirely with consumer harm and not with competition. Although in this case the consumer harm seems to be that a >$750 phone costs ~$20 more than it might otherwise.
themodder666 7y ago
I hate this entire situation and the article. The feds literally give Qualcomm an IP monopoly and then act all surprised when they exercise those powers. Then the fed expands its own powers to 'deal with it', and the cycle continues. Ugh.
gumby 7y ago
Part of this comes from the willingness of EE standards bodies to standardize on stuff that is covered by patents. I was going to say "part of the blame" but it was Qualcomm's choice to take advantage of this. Rambus is another bad guy in this regard.
- fluffything 7y ago
  This +1. Imagine if ECMA script or the ISO C++ standard were covered by patents.
  - Narishma 7y ago
    Wasn't C# standardized by both ECMA and ISO while having Microsoft patents?
  - knd775 7y ago
    Well there is that one company that keeps claiming that they own C++ and keeps trying to sue people for using it.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      Oh? Please expand.
      - knd775 7y ago
        Sorry for the late response. A company named SCO claims they own the language. They obviously don't (possibly just a specific compiler), but they still try (or tried for a while) to charge licensing fees. I'm having a hard time finding references to this now, but here are two links that talk a bit about it: https://lwn.net/Articles/39227/ https://lwn.net/Articles/39227/ http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#revenues http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#revenues
    - gumby 7y ago
      Don’t you mean java?
Uptrenda 7y ago
The strangle hold is extremely bad for security, too. All of those Qualcomm chips are designed as black boxes. Nobody knows what kind of horrible flaws are inside them because trying to get at the code is like trying to rob the federal reserve. We need open source 3/4/5G chips, but the R & D cost would be astronomical. If you ever think that TCP/IP is complicated check out the mobile system specs some time! They span 1000s of pages... It's amazing to me how much complexity is there. Those phone engineers deserve way more money, IMO.
- farahday 7y ago
  Where can one take a look at those specs? Are there RFC like things available?
  - ferdek 7y ago
    There you go! https://www.3gpp.org/ https://www.3gpp.org/ At the beginning of my corporate career I was working on implementing LTE layer1 (PHY) in internal testing tool. It sometimes took us weeks to understand a single page from the specification - those were fun times ;)
  - yaantc 7y ago
    Here's the landing point I use: https://www.3gpp.org/specifications/specification-numbering https://www.3gpp.org/specifications/specification-numbering In particular, serie 36 is for the LTE RAN (radio access network) while series 38 is for the NR (~5G) RAN. But other series are relevant, for the core and services parts among (many) other things. All the specs are publicly accessible, and also the change requests (CR) submitted for discussion at the standardization meetings, as well as the minutes. From a spec page you can get to its history and the related CRs. Now of course, there are side discussions but the process is still very open in practice. But it's really huge, don't really expect to make sense of it with a little casual looking around. It takes some real time investment and commitment. Another point to keep in mind: the cellular industry has one of the most demanding certification process for consumer grade devices. And operators often add on top of this. You don't want buggy devices messing up a shared medium, particularly when it's a scarce resource in many places (high density urban area at peak time). If designing a cellular modem is hard, making it go successfully through certification and also work well in the field and pass the tiers 1 operators field trials (drive tests in particularly harsh locations) and interoperability tests is even harder. A lot of people miss this part. It takes millions in test equipment just to get ready to enter certification, and that's not the main cost. Even if it's painful, it's also important to make sure things work reasonably well in such complex, multi-parties systems. Which is why certification is legally required to operate in many places (e.g.: Europe requires GCF certification). There are open implementation of LTE, but none certified and legally usable in the field because of this.
oarla 7y ago
This article makes it sound like Apple and Intel and poor victims of Qualcomm's bullying. That is hardly the case. Both are much bigger than Qualcomm, and have been bullies in their own way. Funny to see them cry wolf
- calyth2018 7y ago
  Try working at say LG, HTC, BlackBerry, anyone that wasn't top dog in their ecosystem. You pay Qualcomm a lot of money just to get access to the modems, but they'll ignore you for bug fixes, firmware, etc... The word Qualcomm drop (update in the Qualcomm code) sent a shiver down my spine. They'd fix one bug and introduce two others, that is if the bug big enough that they couldn't simply ignore you in the first place.
  - systemBuilder 7y ago
    This is more or less totally false more than any other hardware vendor Qualcomm delivers working phones to its chipset customers so that they can copy and modify the designs and so that they succeed it's the failure of Intel to provide a well-integrated working product to customers that made them flop. Qualcomm provides demo phones and schematics for every generation of chipset.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Big, rich victims.
hizxy 7y ago
Cool story
ilaksh 7y ago
Sounds like we should just abolish patents.
jMyles 7y ago
The monopolistic position of qualcomm has ~~not only~~ perhaps driven up prices, but of even greater concern, has created a single point of failure for phone security. I have concerns that, even as full device encryption has evolved and many of us have moved communication to more secure media (Signal, Riot, etc), the very baseband chip of the phone is still acting like a bug in our homes.
- tooltalk 7y ago
  > The monopolistic position of qualcomm has not only driven up prices, What is your evidence of such claim?
  - jMyles 7y ago
    I think that a monopolistic shake down of this nature is always connected to price increases, but you're right that I don't have specific evidence. And in any case, my comment is not about prices, but about security.
- ksec 7y ago
  >The monopolistic position of qualcomm has not only driven up prices There has been no evidence as such. Even in court.
  - jMyles 7y ago
    Fine, I added a "perhaps" - my real point was about spying, not prices.
    - ksec 7y ago
      And it is not a single point of failure either. Huawei, Samsung, Mediatek, all have their own modem, as well as Spreatrum ( It has a new name I can't even remember ) , and Xiaomi and Soon, Apple. I know a lot of people hate Qualcomm, but reading the 230 pages of the report I cant help but felt sorry for them.
Katzenjammer 7y ago
No jail time for Qualcomm officers just means they'll restart right backup when nobody is looking...
Mbaqanga 7y ago
America is rife with de facto monopolies and duopolies. That is our version of capitalism which champions competition but its all talk with little walk. That the government would pick on Qualcomm is a mystery to me. Its lobbyists must not have paid off the right people.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
"Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips." Wow, shocking. I'm surprised Jobs didn't gather a forum of all the handset makers to work as a cabal against QQcom on the issue.
- systemBuilder 7y ago
  Apple is a monopolist and now that the worldwide market for cell phones is shrinking it hates the thought that it is the highest-cost producer dependent on another monopolist. Qualcomm charges effectively a 4-5% VAT on the end-user price of a product. Qualcomm wanted to give the little guys a break. I worked on radio systems design and my wife worked directly for Irwin Jacobs. The big monopolist just fakring hates that the little guys have a chance. It's why you see Apple screaming louder than everybody ... Apple is struggling to raise prices in everything they do these days. They invented the $1,500 phone. They make phones that more and more cannot be disassembled. They started soldering everything to the motherboards (phones, MacBooks). They now put lock down chips in the phone and the laptop so most of the hardware cannot be swapped out and repaired. They charge $500 to replace the back of a phone when Samsung charges $20. They make defective failure-prone keyboards and keep selling them 3 years after the market began complaining. They took out functionality and raised prices with USB C. We are actually close to "peak apple" if you think about it for just 10 seconds. Growth under Tim Cook (mid-2012 to now) has been one third of growth under Steve Jobs (mid 2007-mid 2012).
ksec 7y ago
It seems it is pretty much a one sided opinion against Qualcomm, without taking a look into actual details. I read the 233 page report, and I have to admit I am surprised at how some of the wordings and conclusion the judge came to be. ( And I was very surprised how Ars's Author read the report and did not question anything about it ) And in defence of Qualcomm, I would post a few links from people that had the same thought as I did. [1] Is the Qualcomm information, I think it provides a angle just how much Qualcomm has spent on R&D. While I don't normally consider Cnet as Quality source of news, Shara Tibken [2] has been following the Apple and Qualcomm Trial and has been in the court for every trial between the two, reporting on the "exact" wordings some of these people gave in court. There were lots of details, and Qualcomm clearly has some very decent explanation in every accusation against them. And somehow none of these made it into many other mainstream media. Patrick Moorhead wrote about this [4][5] and I agree with him on every thing ( Apart from the US politics which I am not well versed in ). Things Such as the "common interest agreement” Apple has with the FTC, and Huawei's involvement. Along with completely ignoring the defendant's testimony. It really opens my eyes as to how US law system works compared to UK or Germany. And I would just like to remind everyone, Hating Qualcomm, Qualcomm doing wrong, and Qualcomm is a monopoly are 3 different things. [1] https://www.qualcomm.com/ftc https://www.qualcomm.com/ftc [2] https://twitter.com/sharatibken https://twitter.com/sharatibken [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/05/28/ftc-case-against-qualcomm-gets-weirder-with-northern-district-of-ca-court-ruling/#74c6752412bf https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/05/28/ftc-... [4]https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/03/31/the-10-most-bizarre-things-about-the-ftc-qualcomm-case/#599798d72d5f https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/03/31/the-...
Epopeehief54 7y ago
From everything I hear from him, Judge Koh is consistently one of the better judges I have seen in some time.
- systemBuilder 7y ago
  I don't think so at least if you look at the background of this journalist he writes 100% hit pieces on the tech world. 100% hit pieces.
rurban 7y ago
I was missing the three most important words in this ongoing battle: 1) baseband, 2) backdoors, 3) Huawei.
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528 points by headalgorithm 7y ago

Whilst it seems good to break up this market, it also was rather interesting to see Apple whinge about monopolist market behaviour. Pot calling the kettle black; how very hypocritical.

Veen 7y ago
In which market does Apple have a monopoly?
- zeveb 7y ago
  The iPhone app-approval market leaps to mind.
  - Veen 7y ago
    If you mean Apple owns and runs an App Store, then yes, but that’s not a monopoly. It’s just a store that they control. Would you say that their physical stores are a monopoly that they abuse by not selling samsung phones?
    - sundvor 7y ago
      Then why are we seeing eg https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-against-apple-allowing-an-app-store-antitrust-case-to-proceed/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-agains... ? Regardless, their behaviour with their own Dev relations is very much like what they're accusing Qualcomm of.
      - rstupek 7y ago
        The supreme court didn't say Apple was a monopoly it said that people could sue them to see if they were.
      - Despegar 7y ago
        The Supreme Court didn't rule on the merits of the case. The actual antitrust case is extremely weak against Apple. You'd need a nonsensical market definition to say Apple has monopoly power, and it wouldn't hold up in court.
    - zeveb 7y ago
      > If you mean Apple owns and runs an App Store, then yes, but that’s not a monopoly. They also refuse to permit their customers to run apps not approved by Apple on the phones they have bought. That's the monopoly.
      - mason55 7y ago
        Huh? That’s still not a monopoly. Argue that they’re violating anti-consumers laws to have access to device you purchased, sure, but what you’re describing is in no way a monopoly.
        criddell 7y ago
        I think it comes down to how narrow you want to define the market. And even if it is a monopoly, that doesn't mean anything by itself. Monopolies aren't illegal.
      - village-idiot 7y ago
        That’s factually false. You can side load apps, plenty of enterprises do it.
        sigstoat 7y ago
        last i looked that requires a couple hundred dollar per year special developer account from apple, with special checks to make sure you're actually a business doing it for business reasons. and they still sign your apps, they just do it automatically, i think.
        village-idiot 7y ago
        So? You can still side load. Developers do it all the time. The approval process is only for distributing your private app to hundreds of people using Apple’s servers and hardware.
        sigstoat 7y ago
    - pier25 7y ago
      The monopoly is that no other software distributor can be used on iOS other than Apple.
      - YUMad 7y ago
        That is a monopoly in their own product, not in a market.
        pier25 7y ago
        Doesn't matter, Apple is the only supplier of iOS apps and forbids any competition here.
        conception 7y ago
        LG is the only supplier of apps for their TVs and forbids any competition there.
        pier25 7y ago
        So?
        closetohome 7y ago
        Exactly.
        henryfjordan 7y ago
        So does LG take a 30% rake of all app sales? It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to take advantage of that fact with non-competitive pricing.
        xwdv 7y ago
        This poor understanding of what a monopoly is on your part is a testament to how uncommon true monopolies have become thanks to modern regulation.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      If I want to sell an app to users on iOS, and those users want my app, there's no way for them to get it without Apple. That's a vertical market monopoly. And even if it doesn't qualify as a monopoly in your mind, it can still run afoul of anti-trust law.
      - zaroth 7y ago
        If you want to sell a product in Apple’s physical store, there’s no way to do it without Apple. That’s not a monopoly. That’s them exercising control over their own property. What’s the rationale to treat Apple’s digital store different than Apple’s physical store?
      - scarface74 7y ago
        You could say the same about console makers. They have been doing the same thing since the 80s....
  - CharlesW 7y ago
    That's like saying McDonald's has a monopoly on what food appears on their menu. It's non-sensical as a complaint.
    - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
      In United States v. Microsoft Corp.[0] it was determined that Microsoft abused monopoly it's power by simply preventing OEMs from removing internet explorer. Apple demands that all web browsing is done via Safari on IOS as I understand it. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
      - npunt 7y ago
        Microsoft had a 90%+ market share in computer operating systems, aka a monopoly. So there's that.
      - Veen 7y ago
        But Microsoft did have a monopoly in the browser market at that time. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in the browser market or the phone market or the app market. You can’t abuse a monopoly you don’t have.
        mbreese 7y ago
        The monopoly was in the OS market. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to use that monopoly to create a new one in the nascent browser market.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        And Apple has no monopoly. Having a monopoly is a pre-requisite for being found guilty of using a monopoly to leverage your way into an adjacent market. End of story.
        tooltalk 7y ago
        QCOM doesn't have a monopoly in the baseband market either, yet Koh's court found QCOM's monopoly there. The FTC simply redefined a market where QCOM had a dominant marketshare -- the "premium" modem market (LTE) -- for Koh to come to that ruling. So I guess if someone can prove AAPL's dominance in "premium" PC, education, or some niche subgroup in PC market, it too can be in trouble.
- sundvor 7y ago
  App Store, in their ios ecosystem.
  - Veen 7y ago
    Perhaps you should take a moment to review what a monopoly is.
    - cabaalis 7y ago
      I believe OP is referring to the recent ruling allowing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple's app store to proceed. Not necessarily declared a monopoly yet, but also not declared not one. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18617727/apple-v-pepper-antitrust-illinois-brick-supreme-court-case-loss https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18617727/apple-v-pepper-a...
      - sundvor 7y ago
        Yes. My point was that they are exhibiting the same type of behaviour that they're accusing Qualcomm of, and that's why I said that's the pot calling the kettle black; they are more than happy to embrace the same self serving behaviour when it serves them. The app store paid out $34bn to devs last year, so a very simple and probably naive calculation of 34/.7*.3 tells me they pocketed around ~$14.5bn in revenue from a total of $48.5bn. (source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/developer-apos-34-billion-earnings-002422266.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/developer-apos-34-billion-ear... ) That really ought to be big enough a pot to warrant my drawing the parallel. Furthermore, - They have absolute control and will shut down things whenever they want, such as parental control apps - https://www.macworld.com/article/3391361/apple-privacy-parental-control-apps-screen-time.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3391361/apple-privacy-paren... . - They claim you may install alternative apps, yet you may not set them as default handlers to replace Apple's native ones- https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18644045/apple-defends-app-store-policies-antitrust-eu-spotify https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18644045/apple-defends-ap... - They're playing hardball with Spotify, who are also using the word "monopoly": https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18530894/apple-music-monopoly-spotify-app-store-europe https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18530894/apple-music-monop...

guardiangod 7y ago

As a former worker at Blackberry(RIM) cellular chip division (hello fellow RCT-ees), this article explains so much it physically hurts me. RIM pushed hard to develop its own chip 3G/4G chips because Qualcomm absolutely strangled the company with its licensing cost/terms. They pretty much demanded a separate cellular R&D team (QCT) that duplicates half the effort. All CDMA based phones must contain chips from QCT because Qualcomm holds CDMA patents and they won't license them to anyone. Finally, Qualcomm was, while very technically competent, will give you no assistance whatsoever if you deviate from what they want you to do. Basically 'my way or the highway.' Edit: As an aside, my heart goes out to Intel's defunct Infineon-based 5G modem team.

macspoofing 7y ago
Did they really 'strangle the company'? Blackberry had a meteroic rise and they collapsed because of iPhone and (later) Android.
- ansible 7y ago
  That's a good question. Yes, margins are low for most phones, most of the time. And cheaper modem chipsets would help with that. But if everyone had cheaper chipsets... then the phones would be a little cheaper. But I don't think that would have changed the competitive landscape at that time. There was a fundamental change in phone capability and interaction that really shifted the market, and made new winners and losers.
- protomyth 7y ago
  After reading about it particularly "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry", I think guardiangod is correct, but also Verizon and, to a much lesser extent, the whole stock dating scandal. If Verizon hadn't been so gun-ho for an iPhone killer, Blackberry would probably of got to something like the Passport a whole lot faster. They needed to stay in their lane for a bit longer. Their market cap actually hit its max a year after the iPhone. I wouldn't call RIM / Blackberry a meteroic rise. They start in the mid 90's and built up the products in a pretty smart way with each following the next until the total shift of the Storm.

npunt 7y ago

This article is a good read, adding a lot of context to my understanding of the Qualcomm/Apple spat and it's merits. You can see in the history there were several potential market opportunities that companies were unable to act on due to Qualcomm's behavior.

pier25 7y ago

So why did Apple decide to make its own SOCs but not its own modem chips? I would expect making CPUs and GPUs to be a lot more difficult than modems, no?

wmf 7y ago
CPU design and RF stuff are both very difficult; I wouldn't assume one way or the other. I wonder if knowledge of CPU design is more widely dispersed (e.g. you can hire ex-Intel, ex-AMD, ex-IBM people) than cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm.
- derefr 7y ago
  > cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm. Seems strange, given that plenty of manufacturers are making the radios on the other side of the cellular connection. Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio?
  - bradstewart 7y ago
    What does "redo their tape-outs for phone scale" mean exactly? Can Intel redo their tape-outs to make a Xeon work in a phone? I suspect those high-power radios are not doing the majority of the RF in silicon.
  - guardiangod 7y ago
    Heh, there are various levels of 'working'. Think Windows 9x kernel vs NT kernel. Both kernels 'work'.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    > Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio? Workable maybe but not power efficient, which is crucial in mobile. That takes years to figure out and is the reason why ARM is so utterly dominant on mobile - there simply is not any Intel x86 offering even close to the power envelope of ARM, even after years of ARM dominance Intel hasn't managed to get anything meaningful.

bsder 7y ago

Is Qualcomm a ruthless monopolist? Yep. But what people forget is that EVERYBODY was knifing one another in that space when CDMA originally came out. The only difference is that Qualcomm is the ruthless monopolist that won. In addition, while I have no love lost for Qualcomm, what you do have to remember is that CDMA was a "bet the farm" moment. If CDMA could be delivered, it was significantly better than what existed at the time. However, there was no promise that a power amplifier could be delivered with the specifications demanded by CDMA--Qualcomm bet that they could. Rockwell had a worldwide monopoly on CDMA power amplifiers for years because they were delivering that amp, and the yield was abysmal. The original Qualcomm stuff was a significant engineering achievement, and, while they probably don't deserve to continue to abuse their position at this point, they certainly deserved some time to profit from their work.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tareqak 7y ago
What other corporation requires paying to license their patent portfolio in order to be allowed buy their products? I don't have to pay for a license from McDonald's to eat their burger. I'm not an expert in this domain, so there might be more relevant example. Update: fixed up my wording.
- aspenmayer 7y ago
  You do have to agree to the McDonald's app terms and conditions so you can get its benefits, like skipping the line. You pay twice: first, with money; then, with data.
  - tareqak 7y ago
    You're paying to skip the line using data, but you're not paying for the meal with data. If you could only purchase the meal using the app, then you could make the argument that some part of the meal price could be paid from the data itself. I don't know if there are vending machines that will only sell if you have the relevant app installed first, but I think those come closer. However, unless the terms of service of any of those approaches penalized me for buying a meal at Burger King, then we aren't quite at the same level of scrutiny as opposed to what was reported to have happened in this article.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

davidf18 7y ago

"In recent years, Samsung has often shipped smartphones with its own Exynos chips in some markets, while selling Qualcomm chips in others—particularly the United States and China. It's not clear exactly why it does this, but a reasonable guess is that Samsung believes that it's more vulnerable to Qualcomm's patent threats in those countries." Qualcomm originally had the patents for CDMA (as opposed to GSM) which has a lot of presence in the US and in China but not most of the rest of the world. In years when Apple used both Qualcomm and Intel chips, the Qualcomm chips were for Verizon and Sprint which were CDMA networks before LTE and the Intel chips went to AT&T and T-Mobile which both use GSM.

throw7 7y ago

And congress will do nothing about IP, specifically patents as it relates to this story.

tracker1 7y ago
I wish... patent reform on extension patents in particular in addition to a dual sourcing requirement from the FDA would let a more natural market take care of a lot of what's wrong with medications. In general, at this point, I'd love to see the entire patent system dismantled rather than keep what we have.

blunte 7y ago

I find great irony in Qualcomm exercising a monopoly position to take a % of total phone price from Apple... since Apple uses its monopoly position to take a % of all app revenue. What Apple thinks would be fair for Qualcomm chip license fees would also be reasonable for App Store fees.

kumarvvr 7y ago
> since Apple uses its monopoly position to take a % of all app revenue Wait. What are you talking about? They own a platform, others want to use that platform to make money, so Apple is charging fees to use their platform. Where is the monopoly part? Developers have other avenues to sell their software on (Android) iOS and Android can be classified as a Duopoly though.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  Duopoly is when the two heterogenous companies coöperate to form a monopoly. That was Wintel. A cartel is when a small number of homogenous companies share the market while ostensibly competing with each other, but coöperate to erect barriers to anyone else getting into the market. If Apple and Google block other companies from getting into the mobile device business, they would be a cartel.
  - Bakary 7y ago
    Did you start using that spelling from reading the New Yorker?
    - braythwayt 7y ago
      Which spelling?
      - ncmncm 7y ago
        Probably the diæresis: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-... The "æ" is a whole nother thing.

RobDrk 7y ago

for a counter view by the current FTC commissioner https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust-overreach-11559085055 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust-ov...

RobDrk 7y ago

for a counter view on this from yesterdays WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust-overreach-11559085055 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust-ov... this is by the FTC commissioner (the agency that sued Q)

asr 7y ago
Very interesting I had not seen this. Note there are five ftc commissioners. Christine Wilson is one of three republicans. She is unfortunately the one who seems the most trumpian. She misleadingly quotes a filing her own agency made in this op-ed. Because of that, and a few other turns of phrase in here that appear frequently in Qualcomm PR (such as the factually incorrect statement that this case was filed during the Obama administration--it was actually filed under Trump) I'm willing to bet a lot of money Qualcomm wrote this and gave it to her and she signed off on it.
- RobDrk 7y ago
  it was filed when the last administration was on the way out but still had dem majority. also see the dissent written by one of the commissioner at that time. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/170117qualcomm_mko_dissenting_statement_17-1-17a.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/170117qualc... i feel the ars article is a hit job as is the PR from Q.
  - SmokeGS 7y ago
    I just looked at the FTC government archives from 1919-2009 and there is a gap after 2008 with missing volumes 146-148. https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/commission-decision-volumes https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/commission... Does anyone know why this is the case?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - asr 7y ago
    I just double-checked and you are right! Filed Jan. 17, 2019. Apologies. For some reason I thought it was filed a few days after Trump became president, but I was mis-remembering.

planetsmashr 7y ago

I recently worked with a technical VP at a chip foundry in South Korea. One day Quallcom came up in discussion and he said "Qualcomm are like gangsters in the industry".

tooltalk 7y ago
I know this is completely tangential, but just wondering if Apple ever came up in discussion.
- ddorian43 7y ago
  Apple is the gangster in the hood.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    What Apple did to/with that glass foundry that went under was straight-up gangster.
    - nasut 7y ago
      And because of that the little glass (actually sapphire) company´s execs are in court for fraud and the little glass company Apple raised from obscurity (Gorilla) is doing pretty well - Right. Gangster
      - sangnoir 7y ago
        I might be missing your sarcasm (as they are not 'little'), but are you suggesting that Apple raised the 168 year old, S&P 500 Corning Glass from obscurity?

ncmncm 7y ago

After reading through the comments quarreling about whether Qualcomm and Apple are acting within their rights to charge monopoly-sized rent where they can, and do, it's hard for me to fathom the depths of confusion Americans are reduced to whenever these topics come up. First and foremost: when you are as big as Qualcomm and Apple are in their respective spheres, you don't need rights. You have POWER, which is far, far better, especially when you can use it to extract money to buy more power with. Rights are for little people. Qualcomm has been at this for decades. How long can you get away with just parking your car in the wrong place? Second, when you talk about abuse of monopoly power, it makes no sense to look at it from the standpoint of the monopolist. Everything is stacked in their favor. The important question is, what can the little guy do? Not other companies, even though they complain most effectively (like Apple or Intel complaining about Qualcomm), or even small ones that can't. They would all love to be monopolies too, and sometimes are. What matters is, what is the experience of somebody who got an iPhone for her quinceaña, or of the farmer stuck with a busted John Deere tractor? Each is obliged to pay a huge premium -- for software, or repairs -- because the 400-pound gorilla can force the matter. The fact that somebody else has an Android phone or an IH tractor doesn't help either of them. Each is stuck with what Apple or Deere is willing to let them have. The law doesn't need to define a monopoly: only a monopoly can exercise monopoly power, so it suffices to look for that happening. Any monopoly not visibly abusing its monopoly power has nothing to worry about, because nobody can tell. Anti-trust law doesn't make it illegal to have a monopoly. It just says that if you choose to make one -- and every monopoly chose it -- different rules apply. The law defines lots of rules, but the DOJ has chosen to ignore almost all because of a lately fashionable notion promoted by Chicago-school economists that nothing matters except high prices. Under the law there is a hell of a lot of monopoly abuse nobody at DOJ will even look at, that have all kinds of deleterious results. Anybody who wants to do anything about any of it gets mobbed by defenders of monopolists' rights. And that's where we are today. Qualcomm got in trouble by making things unpleasant for other 400-pound gorillas, and we get to watch. Offenses against us are entirely ignored, and now people insist that's normal and right, law or no law.

wmf 7y ago
Offenses against us are entirely ignored... Meanwhile everybody else is saying that US antitrust law is concerned entirely with consumer harm and not with competition. Although in this case the consumer harm seems to be that a >$750 phone costs ~$20 more than it might otherwise.

themodder666 7y ago

I hate this entire situation and the article. The feds literally give Qualcomm an IP monopoly and then act all surprised when they exercise those powers. Then the fed expands its own powers to 'deal with it', and the cycle continues. Ugh.

gumby 7y ago

Part of this comes from the willingness of EE standards bodies to standardize on stuff that is covered by patents. I was going to say "part of the blame" but it was Qualcomm's choice to take advantage of this. Rambus is another bad guy in this regard.

fluffything 7y ago
This +1. Imagine if ECMA script or the ISO C++ standard were covered by patents.
- Narishma 7y ago
  Wasn't C# standardized by both ECMA and ISO while having Microsoft patents?
- knd775 7y ago
  Well there is that one company that keeps claiming that they own C++ and keeps trying to sue people for using it.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Oh? Please expand.
    - knd775 7y ago
      Sorry for the late response. A company named SCO claims they own the language. They obviously don't (possibly just a specific compiler), but they still try (or tried for a while) to charge licensing fees. I'm having a hard time finding references to this now, but here are two links that talk a bit about it: https://lwn.net/Articles/39227/ https://lwn.net/Articles/39227/ http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#revenues http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#revenues
  - gumby 7y ago
    Don’t you mean java?

Uptrenda 7y ago

The strangle hold is extremely bad for security, too. All of those Qualcomm chips are designed as black boxes. Nobody knows what kind of horrible flaws are inside them because trying to get at the code is like trying to rob the federal reserve. We need open source 3/4/5G chips, but the R & D cost would be astronomical. If you ever think that TCP/IP is complicated check out the mobile system specs some time! They span 1000s of pages... It's amazing to me how much complexity is there. Those phone engineers deserve way more money, IMO.

farahday 7y ago
Where can one take a look at those specs? Are there RFC like things available?
- ferdek 7y ago
  There you go! https://www.3gpp.org/ https://www.3gpp.org/ At the beginning of my corporate career I was working on implementing LTE layer1 (PHY) in internal testing tool. It sometimes took us weeks to understand a single page from the specification - those were fun times ;)
- yaantc 7y ago
  Here's the landing point I use: https://www.3gpp.org/specifications/specification-numbering https://www.3gpp.org/specifications/specification-numbering In particular, serie 36 is for the LTE RAN (radio access network) while series 38 is for the NR (~5G) RAN. But other series are relevant, for the core and services parts among (many) other things. All the specs are publicly accessible, and also the change requests (CR) submitted for discussion at the standardization meetings, as well as the minutes. From a spec page you can get to its history and the related CRs. Now of course, there are side discussions but the process is still very open in practice. But it's really huge, don't really expect to make sense of it with a little casual looking around. It takes some real time investment and commitment. Another point to keep in mind: the cellular industry has one of the most demanding certification process for consumer grade devices. And operators often add on top of this. You don't want buggy devices messing up a shared medium, particularly when it's a scarce resource in many places (high density urban area at peak time). If designing a cellular modem is hard, making it go successfully through certification and also work well in the field and pass the tiers 1 operators field trials (drive tests in particularly harsh locations) and interoperability tests is even harder. A lot of people miss this part. It takes millions in test equipment just to get ready to enter certification, and that's not the main cost. Even if it's painful, it's also important to make sure things work reasonably well in such complex, multi-parties systems. Which is why certification is legally required to operate in many places (e.g.: Europe requires GCF certification). There are open implementation of LTE, but none certified and legally usable in the field because of this.

oarla 7y ago

This article makes it sound like Apple and Intel and poor victims of Qualcomm's bullying. That is hardly the case. Both are much bigger than Qualcomm, and have been bullies in their own way. Funny to see them cry wolf

calyth2018 7y ago
Try working at say LG, HTC, BlackBerry, anyone that wasn't top dog in their ecosystem. You pay Qualcomm a lot of money just to get access to the modems, but they'll ignore you for bug fixes, firmware, etc... The word Qualcomm drop (update in the Qualcomm code) sent a shiver down my spine. They'd fix one bug and introduce two others, that is if the bug big enough that they couldn't simply ignore you in the first place.
- systemBuilder 7y ago
  This is more or less totally false more than any other hardware vendor Qualcomm delivers working phones to its chipset customers so that they can copy and modify the designs and so that they succeed it's the failure of Intel to provide a well-integrated working product to customers that made them flop. Qualcomm provides demo phones and schematics for every generation of chipset.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Big, rich victims.

hizxy 7y ago

Cool story

ilaksh 7y ago

Sounds like we should just abolish patents.

jMyles 7y ago

The monopolistic position of qualcomm has ~~not only~~ perhaps driven up prices, but of even greater concern, has created a single point of failure for phone security. I have concerns that, even as full device encryption has evolved and many of us have moved communication to more secure media (Signal, Riot, etc), the very baseband chip of the phone is still acting like a bug in our homes.

tooltalk 7y ago
> The monopolistic position of qualcomm has not only driven up prices, What is your evidence of such claim?
- jMyles 7y ago
  I think that a monopolistic shake down of this nature is always connected to price increases, but you're right that I don't have specific evidence. And in any case, my comment is not about prices, but about security.
ksec 7y ago
>The monopolistic position of qualcomm has not only driven up prices There has been no evidence as such. Even in court.
- jMyles 7y ago
  Fine, I added a "perhaps" - my real point was about spying, not prices.
  - ksec 7y ago
    And it is not a single point of failure either. Huawei, Samsung, Mediatek, all have their own modem, as well as Spreatrum ( It has a new name I can't even remember ) , and Xiaomi and Soon, Apple. I know a lot of people hate Qualcomm, but reading the 230 pages of the report I cant help but felt sorry for them.

Katzenjammer 7y ago

No jail time for Qualcomm officers just means they'll restart right backup when nobody is looking...

Mbaqanga 7y ago

America is rife with de facto monopolies and duopolies. That is our version of capitalism which champions competition but its all talk with little walk. That the government would pick on Qualcomm is a mystery to me. Its lobbyists must not have paid off the right people.

sonnyblarney 7y ago

"Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips." Wow, shocking. I'm surprised Jobs didn't gather a forum of all the handset makers to work as a cabal against QQcom on the issue.

systemBuilder 7y ago
Apple is a monopolist and now that the worldwide market for cell phones is shrinking it hates the thought that it is the highest-cost producer dependent on another monopolist. Qualcomm charges effectively a 4-5% VAT on the end-user price of a product. Qualcomm wanted to give the little guys a break. I worked on radio systems design and my wife worked directly for Irwin Jacobs. The big monopolist just fakring hates that the little guys have a chance. It's why you see Apple screaming louder than everybody ... Apple is struggling to raise prices in everything they do these days. They invented the $1,500 phone. They make phones that more and more cannot be disassembled. They started soldering everything to the motherboards (phones, MacBooks). They now put lock down chips in the phone and the laptop so most of the hardware cannot be swapped out and repaired. They charge $500 to replace the back of a phone when Samsung charges $20. They make defective failure-prone keyboards and keep selling them 3 years after the market began complaining. They took out functionality and raised prices with USB C. We are actually close to "peak apple" if you think about it for just 10 seconds. Growth under Tim Cook (mid-2012 to now) has been one third of growth under Steve Jobs (mid 2007-mid 2012).

ksec 7y ago

It seems it is pretty much a one sided opinion against Qualcomm, without taking a look into actual details. I read the 233 page report, and I have to admit I am surprised at how some of the wordings and conclusion the judge came to be. ( And I was very surprised how Ars's Author read the report and did not question anything about it ) And in defence of Qualcomm, I would post a few links from people that had the same thought as I did. [1] Is the Qualcomm information, I think it provides a angle just how much Qualcomm has spent on R&D. While I don't normally consider Cnet as Quality source of news, Shara Tibken [2] has been following the Apple and Qualcomm Trial and has been in the court for every trial between the two, reporting on the "exact" wordings some of these people gave in court. There were lots of details, and Qualcomm clearly has some very decent explanation in every accusation against them. And somehow none of these made it into many other mainstream media. Patrick Moorhead wrote about this [4][5] and I agree with him on every thing ( Apart from the US politics which I am not well versed in ). Things Such as the "common interest agreement” Apple has with the FTC, and Huawei's involvement. Along with completely ignoring the defendant's testimony. It really opens my eyes as to how US law system works compared to UK or Germany. And I would just like to remind everyone, Hating Qualcomm, Qualcomm doing wrong, and Qualcomm is a monopoly are 3 different things. [1] https://www.qualcomm.com/ftc https://www.qualcomm.com/ftc [2] https://twitter.com/sharatibken https://twitter.com/sharatibken [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/05/28/ftc-case-against-qualcomm-gets-weirder-with-northern-district-of-ca-court-ruling/#74c6752412bf https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/05/28/ftc-... [4]https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/03/31/the-10-most-bizarre-things-about-the-ftc-qualcomm-case/#599798d72d5f https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/03/31/the-...

Epopeehief54 7y ago

From everything I hear from him, Judge Koh is consistently one of the better judges I have seen in some time.

systemBuilder 7y ago
I don't think so at least if you look at the background of this journalist he writes 100% hit pieces on the tech world. 100% hit pieces.

rurban 7y ago

I was missing the three most important words in this ongoing battle: 1) baseband, 2) backdoors, 3) Huawei.

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