Qualcomm Fined Record $773 Million In Taiwan Antitrust Probe (bloomberg.com) 23
According to Bloomberg, Qualcomm was fined a record NT$23.4 billion ($773 million) by Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission in the latest blow from regulators over the way the U.S. company prices mobile phone chips and patents. From the report: The company has been violating antitrust rules for at least 7 years and Qualcomm collected NT$400 billion in licensing fees from local companies during that time, the Taiwanese regulator said on its website Wednesday. Qualcomm disagrees with the decision and intends to appeal, the San Diego-based company said in a statement. The Taiwanese regulator said Qualcomm has monopoly market status over key mobile phone standards and by not providing products to clients who don't agree with its conditions, the U.S. company is violating local laws. It said Taiwanese companies had purchased $30 billion worth of Qualcomm baseband chips. Besides the fine, the Fair Trade Commission told Qualcomm to remove previously signed deals that force competitors to provide price, customer names, shipment, model name and other sensitive information as well as other clauses in its agreements.
Re: Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer (Score:1)
If you want a free market, how about we go for broke? No government protection of patents, no government protection of copyrights, no government subsidies, no special allowances and rules at all.
What's that? Qualcomm really wants their government provided monopolies? Well, that's a shame.
Re: Antitrust is anti-business and anti-consumer (Score:1)
The dial button on mobile and the slider in classic lets you view low rated messages. It's only when you start putting Scientology texts into comments that they remove your post.
Also: fuck Qualcomm
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Moderation is NOT a tool to voice agreement or disagreement
Oh, you must be new here.
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-1
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Why do you hate Adam Smith?
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I totally agree.
The government shouldn't be providing Qualcomm with exclusive rights to their patents. That kind of regulation harms other businesses and consumers.
There wouldn't be any antitrust issues if there was no monopoly on ideas.
Slap on the wrist as usual (Score:3)
Oh well, better than nothing.
Is there really any competition on CDMA yet? (Score:2)
Qualcomm getting into manufacturing instead of just farming out their designs was a step that
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An Intel inside iPhone would be an interesting development.
Asus made Atom based phones for a while and they were really cheap, mainly because Intel had a complicated deal where Intel paid various expenses to offset the cost of the chips. So the net cost of an Atom chip to Asus was low and may even have been negative (I've heard -$40 per device).
Asus didn't sell many phones and switched over to Qualcomm. And still don't sell many phones.
Atom has come on quite a bit since then - out of order execution for exa
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It really is too bad that Intel has killed Atom line.
They've killed off the name 'Atom' for netbooks and I'm not sure they're launching any more phone SKUs, but the Atom microarchitecture lives on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.anandtech.com/show... [anandtech.com]
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An Intel inside iPhone would be an interesting development.
Already happening. Fortune [fortune.com]
Intel is working on much more than that and is trying hard to break into the phone market in a really big way, not just with atom based arch. Even though they have been out of the running for 16 years [eetimes.com] it seems this time they are coming back and are really looking for the brainz [intel.com] this time. Like I said either they are paying Qualcomm to not sue them or we might see a major tech merger. Say perhaps Qualcomm and Intel in a joint venture with a mind to squash Samsung once and for all