"most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia"
Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).
Should've thought of that before they sold it to a Japanese fund.
Yeah, so? If the 21st century taught us anything, is that protectionism makes sense for many products/services (not that big countries really forgot it - they only "forgot" it when for the time that their products was the only game in town).
The big powers that profited most in the 20th century, weren't following free trade - they were colonial and post-colonial overlords, enforcing their trade deals and terms on lesser countries.
Free trade was OK for those big countries like the US, UK, France, Germany, etc they were running the shots, and were net top exporters themselvess...
And even at that, they themselves could not care less about "free trade" doctrines. Sponsoring your own country industries, using your political force to get global deals, subsidies, etc, were OK for the mid-20th/early 21st century, when they had done it.
When that changed, and their trade partners got increasingly bigger, "free trade" got too much for them and pressured their partners countries (like with the Plaza Accord).
Now that the US can't do the same to China (due to its sheer size and power), old globalization and free trade flag-bearers discovered suddenly that free trade might not be the "be all end all".
This is one of the main reason why US is fighting China.
[Sidenote: this has resulted in the hilariousness of taking an Android kernel and development infrastructure and them slowly trying to make it back into something that looks like a normal Linux system. Their board support package is a hot mess, but gets used in real products because the hardware actually works well. A software company NVidia is not.]