European Commission Fines Qualcomm €997M for Abuse of Dominant Market Position

[evernessince]

I'm an European but I'm really starting to doubt these EU decisions. A billion from Microsoft, one from Intel, one from Apple, now from Qualcomm. A billion here, a billion there, more and more this starts to look like extortion fees for companies being able to sell in the EU...

Those were all legitimate decisions. Microsoft was undoubly guilty of using it's position in the market to push Microsoft Software like Internet explorer over competitors. The Intel fine should have been even more. AMD lost allot more money than Intel gained or was fined for. You have to make the fines large enough to discourage corperations from engaging in the behavior in the future. You should be thankful they do this, because in America out 10 million dollar fines or less haven't done anything. Don't forget about the EU lawsuite of the Computer Monitor manufacturers, which were proven to have colluded to fix monitor prices at the time. Hopefully the EU also does the same to memory manufacturers.

 

[BrainCruser]

Yeah but the thing is that Intel has a manufacturing plant in Ireland, hence Intel is a European manufacturer. Those rebates were probably also directed at some European builders. Apple has no such thing, as far as I know, they only have data centers and other businesses in Ireland, no Apple products are made on European soil. Qualcomm also as far as I know is manufacturing its products in China and Taiwan. So what jurisdiction does the EU have over these things happening on the American and Asian continents? What's going to happen next? The European Commission is going to fine Mitsubishi because it had a deal with Yamaha in Osaka, Japan over opening a new manufacturing plant in Mogadishu, Africa?

As long as a company wants to sell in the EU, it has to respect eu law. If it doesn't it will be banned. Qualcomm really really doesn't want to be banned in the eu.

 

[bug]

So how did they prove it wasn't cost reduction or something. Qualcomm should be free to pay apple to use their products if so desire. I mean I don't mind the movie actors paying me to watch their performance, works for me. But that never happens. The government and other parasite structures for collecting money should be abolished.

That why I drew a parallel with Intel's case. Intel went to the manufacturers and asked: how many AMD chips are you hoping to sell? The answer was "about 10%". So Intel said, well, what if I gave you a 10% discount on Intel CPUs? Which basically meant manufacturers were getting 10% CPUs for free, as long as they didn't use AMD. So there was no way for AMD to make a compelling case for their products, short of giving them away for free.
It's what happened here apparently, only instead of physical chips we're talking LTE patents licensing.

 

[Johnny Utah]

I'm an European but I'm really starting to doubt these EU decisions.
A billion from Microsoft, one from Intel, one from Apple, now from Qualcomm. A billion here, a billion there, more and more this starts to look like extortion fees for companies being able to sell in the EU...

Those companies broke EU laws, it's that simple but even if it would be as you say, why do you care?
Apple will pay $38bn in taxes in USA and you are worried about a fine they will pay in EU, it's ridiculous

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/17/apple-cash-tax-jobs

 

[evernessince]

That why I drew a parallel with Intel's case. Intel went to the manufacturers and asked: how many AMD chips are you hoping to sell? The answer was "about 10%". So Intel said, well, what if I gave you a 10% discount on Intel CPUs? Which basically meant manufacturers were getting 10% CPUs for free, as long as they didn't use AMD. So there was no way for AMD to make a compelling case for their products, short of giving them away for free.
It's what happened here apparently, only instead of physical chips we're talking LTE patents licensing.

It was actually worse than that. Dell at one point was receiving more in rebates than it was making profits from it's products. AMD actually did try to give away a boatload of it's processor but OEMs did not want to risk loosing their rebates or angering Intel.

Intel is a underhanded company. Just look at the low clocks of coffee lake for a very recent example. 2.8 GHz on the 8400. Reviewers pegged Coffee Lake as the new king of gaming, the only problem is they only tested with top of the line motherboards. We are seeing OEM PCs with the 8400 and other Coffee Lake processors score 30% lower than the review numbers. That's with both the review system and the OEM system at stock settings. The only difference is the motherboard. This brings up two questions: Does Coffee Lake perform worse with lower end motherboards and is Intel binning all the chips it sells to enthusiasts? It's very possible that people buy based on the reviews but the OEM product they recieve (and OEMs are still a bulk of PC sales) is significantly slower.

This is aside from the recent Intel CEO stock selloff and the lovely new years Meltdown present Intel users got. "Hey you bought our latest processors, happy new year! Oh, by the way, those new processors you just bought are now going to be nerfed. Sorry we couldn't tell you before chirstmas but we like your money too much!"

 

[StrayKAT]

Those companies broke EU laws, it's that simple but even if it would be as you say, why do you care?
Apple will pay $38bn in taxes in USA and you are worried about a fine they will pay in EU, it's ridiculous

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/17/apple-cash-tax-jobs

Not that impressive when one small country (Ireland) is getting 15 billion by itself from Apple in back taxes