Qualcomm Is Accused of Violating Antitrust Rules in Europe
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Gives the impression the EU is deliberately going after US companies when in fact the majority that are investigated for anti-competitive acts are European.
Maybe it's a conspiracy to "go after American companies" from all of these regions. Or maybe Qualcomm did indeed do something bad.
We all profit from having a free market, for that to be existing consumers need to have a choice; the market has to be either free of monopolies, or we have to make sure the monopoly on one market (say, web search) doesn’t quickly turn into a monopoly for other markets (say, mobile OS, web maps, etc), too.
The question to ask is: are these EU investigations effective at reducing the number and spread of monopolies? And if they aren't, what should we do?
Because looking at the Microsoft case, the effectiveness seems dubious.
The concept of the Microsoft case: Make sure that Microsoft can not get a monopoly in the web.
How it was done: Install no browser by default, let people pick. People chose what they had heard of, often Firefox or Chrome.
Result: It led to an almost instantaneous drop in IE market share on new windows installs.
And it most definitely helped end IE’s monopoly over the market.
With Google, it will be far more problematic, and might even end up with Google getting broken up into several companies, or even banned from some markets, or even forced to operate like a governmental monopoly, and integrate competing products equally as they integrate their own.
IE was dropping rapidly before, and it kept dropping more-or-less at the same pace. Firefox actually started dropping right around that time.
People want to believe, but where's the evidence?
> Europe’s antitrust officials in Brussels said that Qualcomm, one of the world’s largest makers of chips, had abused its dominant market position in the region by offering financial incentives to smartphone and tablet manufacturers that agreed to buy equipment solely from Qualcomm.
I think the antitrust regulators mostly act on complaints and given the time frames they work in, it seems to be rather complex, so they don't take on too many of them. So I guess it's just that nobody complained too loudly about Intel in recent years.
EU regulators also have to deal with domestic cases that don't typically end up on HN. Check http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/index.cfm
And i'm not sure if Intel has offered such deals, or simply been selling their Atom chips below cost.
There may also be some issue with Qualcomm sitting on some radio patents. Samsung had to use Qualcomm chips in some Galaxy variants to function on Verizon networks, for instance.