Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgorman | Hacker News Reader

Why would a company which holds an effective monopoly over Android chips in the US do anything in order to discourage the sale of new chips? Providing support for older chips would hurt sales.

Qualcomm is abusing its monopoly position and the laws/patents that allow this need to be changed. Qualcomm is a great example of how IP laws can hurt progress and competition.

In the future China and other countries will leapfrog the US in areas where competition is banned, because the only possible competitors will be in other countries.

View on HN

Google holds a far stronger monopoly than Qualcomm ever will. If Google required the driver support as a condition of allowing Android devices to be distributed with their hardware, Qualcomm would have to comply overnight.

Every single Android device from every manufacturer that wants access to Google apps must be approved by Google, and compliant with Google's terms. The "poor Google is at the mercy of other companies" narrative about Android's product line just doesn't square with the reality.

That's a strange take considering millions of devices sold across the world running AOSP Android without any kind of Google software. From Huawei/Oppo phones in China, car infotainment systems, tablets used in Enterprise environments... Your own post doesn't really square with reality.

Phones in China alone and some infotainment systems won't keep Qualcomm afloat.

But Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly on the market. There's Apple too. Sure, Android mostly uses Qualcomm in higher end models, but that is not the reason why Qualcomm can do anything they want.

The reason things are the way they are is simple - users doesn't care. Users will happily throw cash the for next groundbreaking, awesome possum camera innovation that is just so totally worth the $1000 upgrade, because fabulous selfies are what people care about.

Ok an oligopoly, does that make it better. Apple has a monopoly on Apple silicon.

Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on Apple silicon nobody buys it.

>the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.

They have exclusive possession or control of supply of these types of chips. I'm not sure if the question of whether or not they could sell or want to sell it comes into question. Lets say I buy up all the supplies of diamonds and exclude the use of diamonds in any other use than my jewelry. I believe this still falls under a monopoly

There is no analogy with diamonds, because Apple doesn’t buy up a supply.

There is no supply to buy up - these are just a part apple has made for their own product.

If you use the logic that parts you make for your own products are ‘monopolies’, then most product companies are monopolies, and the term becomes meaningless.

Apple is only another player in "the market" if they start selling chips, or licensing their designs, for use in non-Apple products.

Apple uses Qualcomm as well for their 4G/5G modem. They've started work on fixing that (by buying Intel's business unit that was working on that in 2019) but iphones still contain Qualcomm modems for now.

Most of the industry, except some Chinese vendors, use Qualcomm technology. There just are not a lot of 4G and 5G implementations out there.

In most markets, you end up licensing their patents regardless of whether you use their hard and software too. They have a near monopoly because building a replacement is a non trivial exercise and even if you succeed, you'll still have to license the patents. So, even when Apple ships their replacement, they'll be licensing patents from the likes of Nokia, Qualcomm and a few others for quite some time.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/apple-sta...

(Controversial?) opinion: patents encourage innovation because they force competitors to find new solutions instead of only copying existing solutions.

That doesn’t mean that it could not go terribly wrong as for example when patents blocked progress in 3D printing for decades.

Unfortunately, many patents are intentionally written to make them as broad as possible, minimizing the possibility of designing alternatives.

Most innovation comes from building on existing solutions. You’re advocating reinventing the wheel

Reply on news.ycombinator.com