Earlier this week, the United States Federal Trade Commission claimed that chip giant Qualcomm forced Apple into using its LTE chipsets, as Aaron Tilley writes at Forbes:
Qualcomm is the dominant supplier of modem chips that enable phones to hook up to cellular networks, but the company also extracts licensing fees for nearly every modern phone in the world. The agency’s complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, said the San Diego-based chipmaker used its dominant position to maintain an illegal monopoly over its phone partners like Apple.
The FTC said Qualcomm established an exclusivity agreement with Apple from 2011 until 2016. Qualcomm provided “billions” in rebates to Apple for the arrangement. But if Apple bought modem chips from another chip supplier during that time, the FTC said Apple would face large penalties by losing out on Qualcomm’s rebate payments.
This year, Apple shipped some iPhone 7s with Intel chips inside, which could possibly fit with this timeline.
Today, Apple has sued Qualcomm for $1 billion, as reported by Anita Balakrishnan at CNBC:
Apple says that Qualcomm has taken “radical steps,” including “withholding nearly $1 billion in payments from Apple as retaliation for responding truthfully to law enforcement agencies investigating them.”
Apple added, “Despite being just one of over a dozen companies who contributed to basic cellular standards, Qualcomm insists on charging Apple at least five times more in payments than all the other cellular patent licensors we have agreements with combined.”
Clearly something is going on here. While this may not be as fun to watch as the Apple/Samsung case was, I think this could prove very interesting, and mean wide-reaching changes across the technology industry.