FOSS Patents

Yesterday (Tuesday, January 22) was Day 8 of the FTC v. Qualcomm antitrust trial in San Jose (Northern District of California). The parties don't have much trial time left for testimony on Friday and Monday, and closing arguments have been moved up from next week's Friday to Tuesday. Thereafter, we'll have to wait. As Judge Koh said after the trial session: "Sadly, this opinion's gonna take some time." But that's because she'll presumably deliver something extremely well-reasoned (which doesn't mean that reasonable people might not be able to disagree here or there). The combination of two Apple v. Samsung cases with this landmark antitrust case and numerous other Silicon Valley disputes makes her the world's #1 technology industry judge--and apart from political considerations it's time for her to serve on an appeals court.

The way I see the current state of affairs, Qualcomm really doesn't appear to have any silver bullets. Practically all major players have now testified against Qualcomm (I'll talk more about that on or after Friday since a handful of videotaped Samsung depositions are on the list, though we've already heard testimony from Samsung that supports the FTC). Qualcomm's efforts to impeach industry witnesses have been largely unsuccessful.

Industry consensus hurts Qualcomm in two ways: much of what was said has probative value (even on such questions as whether supra-FRAND royalties were charged), and beyond that, Judge Lucy H. Koh has simply heard from multiple sides now what the issues are. The only company siding with Qualcomm here is Nokia, a company that actually brought the first antitrust complaint over Qualcomm's supra-FRAND patent royalties that I'm aware of. At the time, the EU had a tendency to underenforce (now it is, except with respect to some cases such as Qualcomm, quite the opposite). Meanwhile Nokia's handset business has gone down the tubes, and it's become a patent troll, so it's Qualcomm's natural ally. Nokia's anti-FRAND lobbyist at ETSI and other organizations, Dirk Weiler, claimed not to know whether Nokia was a net licensor. If true, that might make him the only Nokia employee above the level of a receptionist not to know the answer...

The battle of the experts will reach its culmination with Professor Nevo's testimony on Friday, though the FTC's expert economist in this case, Professor Shapiro, has already commented on his methodology and will be able to rebut on Monday.

Qualcomm declared one of its employees, Lorenzo Casaccia (VP of Technical Standards, spending most of his time with 3GPP), an expert on 3GPP. An employee-expert hybrid, but most of what he said was at a technical and practical level, and served to underpin Qualcomm's already pretty successful attack on the approved-contribution counting that one of the FTC's three experts, Michael Lasinski, indirectly relied upon. At times, Mr. Casaccia's testimony sailed close to the hearsay wind, and he claimed to know from people who represented Ericsson and, which he mentioned even more often and more emphatically, Huawei in standard-setting meetings and allegedly told him how their companies had instructed them to inflate the number of approved contributions (the obvious motivation being to increase the percentage of the overall royalties considered reasonable for a standard that a given company would get). Inflation happens by, for instance, splitting up a set of purely editorial/typographical corrections into multiple submissions, none of which has any substance, but every one of which gets counted. I can't verify Mr. Casaccia's allegations, but he said this under oath and it wouldn't surprise me to see an expert known to do a lot of work for Huawei rely on a methodology susceptible to manipulation and favorable to Huawei's financial and strategic interests...

Getting back to non-hybrid experts, I was underwhelmed. In fact, the hybrid employee-expert, with his narrowly-tailored topic, was actually more convincing than the non-hybrids.

One of Qualcomm's experts does nothing else for a living than testifying in litigation: Dr. Tasneem Chipty. Her firm's website says: "Matrix Economics is a boutique consulting firm focused on competition analysis for adversarial proceedings, including antitrust litigation and merger reviews." (emphasis added) There's no doubt she has a lot of experience, but the FTC's Dan Matheson (the order of names on the FTC's filings in this case suggests to me he's #2, after Jennifer Milici) impeached her very effectively. I wouldn't have expected her to struggle so much. When Mr. Matheson asked her about other "thin modem" (meaning baseband chips that are standalone chips as opposed to system-on-a-chip products that do everything including app processing) customers during a certain period, after she had claimed Apple was essentially the only buyer at the time, he pointed to Samsung and its own Exynos chips. The shocking thing was that she wasn't even able to say whether Samsung had used a greater or lower number than 200 million (!) of such chips during the relevant period--and she had to concede she didn't consider this a fact relevant to her analysis.

Dr. Chipty also had to admit she never defined what represents a premium chipset. And with respect to Samsung again, she lumped all of its R&D expenses together, so Mr. Matheson asked her whether she knows Samsung also makes, for instance, washing machines. She was evasive, but lost again.

There was even another major deficiency in Dr. Chipty's testimony that the FTC didn't even raise, but this blog reported on the relevant fact a long time ago: the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) investigated Qualcomm because it prevented Samsung's Exynos division from selling chips to third-party customers such as Meizu. But Dr. Chipty said Professor Shapiro had allegedly made a mistake by not considering Samsung as a competitor in the "merchant" (= ready to sell to others) modem chip market. But the parallel proceedings in Korea--the country Judge Koh's ancestors immigrated from--show that Qualcomm took measures to avoid such competition.

Professor Shapiro will get to rebut her testimony on Monday. I guess he will do so, but in my opinion he doesn't have to anymore. Dr. Chipty appeared a bit unsure and uncomfortable in the second half of her cross-examination. She clearly underperformed.

Qualcomm also called Professor Ted Snyder, the dean of Yale Management School. His testimony isn't worth talking about in detail here. It can be summed up in only five words: "You can't argue with success." In other words, because Qualcomm succeeded and others did not, he didn't care to look into any of the allegedly anticompetitive patterns of behavior at issue in the case. To explain briefly, he says his analysis was "empirical" and focused on "real-world outcomes" and whether they could be "fully explained" with "industry factors," which he claimed they can, but on cross-examination he had to concede that, for just one example, prices could have come down even faster without the additional presence of anticompetitive conduct.

So Qualcomm fielded a hybrid employee-expert who bashed other patent holders but made many reasonable, factual points; a full-time expert witness who potentially considered a quantity of more than 200 million thin modem chips irrelevant to her analysis of what is "competitive relevant" (exactly what she claimed Professor Shapiro failed to consider); an economist with a pointless "You can't argue with success" angle; and we also heard a dreamer (not in the DACA sense, of course): former Qualcomm employee and now professor Jeff Andrews.

Professor Andrews's tasks was to opine, which he did in the form of a rave review, on 34 handpicked Qualcomm patents in order to make the case that Qualcomm's standard-essential patent portfolio contains some technically very valuable stuff (which, even though his analysis stopped far short of patent valuation, let alone portfolio valuation, implied a justification for high royalties).

He looked and sounded like a Qualcomm fanboy. I remember Samsung's lawyers from the Quinn Emanuel firm criticizing Apple for presenting fanboy-style testimony referring to Steve Jobs as "St. Eve," and that testimony ("slavish adoration of their client") may have been structurally similar to what we got from Professor Andrews yesterday.

I've been working on patent policy for too long (about 15 years by now) to consider 34 handpicked patents representative of a portfolio consisting of tens of thousands standard-essential patents. And even a representative selection (which this one clearly wasn't--it had obviously been put together by Qualcomm for the purpose of buttresing its claim of core innovation, which isn't completely wrong but nowhere near as right as its royalty demands are exorbitant) would, based on litigation statistics, likely consist of mostly invalid and/or non-infringed patents.

Motorola built the first mobile phone. But even Motorola's litigation results were very disappointing. The search for a valid patent that can't be worked around (a truly standard-essential patent can't, but participants in standard-setting overdeclare) is the search for a needle in haystack, or for the Holy Grail.

If Qualcomm believed in its patents, why did it provide a covenant not to sue to Apple over a bunch of them just to avoid an adjudication of Apple's declaratory-judgment claims in the Southern District of California under the Super Sack doctrine? In the San Diego case, the motivation may have been to avoid any decision on the sensitive (for Qualcomm) subject of patent exhaustion. Still, a patent holder doesn't exude confidence by ducking declaratory judgment.

On the #ftcqcom Twitter thread, someone repeatedly posted new institutions of inter partes reviews (IPRs) by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) relating to Qualcomm patents. Over the course of the last 8 days, PTAB instituted reviews of a total of 19 (nineteen!) {Update] 21 (twenty-one!) [/Update] Qualcomm patents challenged by Apple.

$QCOM #FTCQCOM US Patent Office just instituted 2 more IPR patent challenges (now the total is 21). These two are both on QCOM Pat. 9535490, which is the only patent ALJ Pender found valid and infringed in the first ITC case. See IPR2018-01344, 46.

— Patent Pundit (@PunditPatent) January 23, 2019

Such reviews are instituted only if a substantive question of patentability has been raised. Under the recent SAS decision by the Supreme Court (I didn't like the outcome but expressed my respect for Justice Gorsuch's principled approach), this means that even if only a single claim warranted a review, all challenged claims must be adjudicated.

On Unified Patents' website, one can run a search for PTAB institutions against Qualcomm during the relevant period and access further details. There's presumably no overlap with the 34 patents Professor Andrews looked at, but statistically any set of patents faces these issues when challenged in litigation. Qualcomm can theoretically defend each and every claim on review, but its statistically very unlikely. The dreamer expert talked about 34 patents as if one couldn't doubt their validity and essentiality. If Qualcomm asserted them in litigation, the professor would get a reality check of the most sobering kind. In my observation, about 90% of all wireless patents asserted in litigation fail.

As Judge Posner already explained in Apple v. Motorola, the compensation a SEP holder is entitled to comes down to the incremental value of an invention over the next best alternative at the time of standard-setting. Even if some of Qualcomm's techniques, such as for carrier aggregation (using multiple segments of spectrum), were adopted, the alternative wouldn't have been "nothing," but something else (and there's no indication Professor Andrews discussed this incremental value other than presumably just relying on the patent specification and the prior art it cites).

Through cross-examination, the FTC got Professor Andrews to confirm that he hadn't performed any valuation nor any comparison with other companies' patents. That should be enough to render his testimony irrelevant. But I'm sure Judge Koh, with her extensive patent-related expertise, views a set of 34 non-litigated patents with a healthy dose of skepticism, like anyone with experience in that field would.

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At this stage, the Northern District of California is a standard-essential patent (SEP) litigation hotbed. The previous post was about Huawei's shrinking case against Samsung, but there are some extremely interesting developments in a consumer class lawsuit against Qualcomm, related to FTC v. Qualcomm. Late last month, the consumer plaintiffs brought a motion to bar Qualcomm from enforcing a potential U.S. import ban against certain (in practical terms, Intel-powered) iPhones. Qualcomm filed its opposition brief on July 12 (this post continues below the document):

18-07-12 Qualcomm's Opposition to Consumers' PI Motion by Florian Mueller on Scribd

Qualcomm's legal arguments against the motion involve timing (the same consumer plaintiffs had filed a public interest statement with the ITC a long time ago, thus they knew about the ITC case, but waited until recently to thwart Qualcomm's pursuit of an exclusion order, i.e., U.S. import ban), standing (whether those consumers are harmed or not), the preliminary injunction factors, whether an ITC case involving non-SEPs has a bearing on an antitrust case involving SEPs, the ability of a district court (under the All Writs Act) to prevent an ITC plaintiff from enforcing an exclusion order, and the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, according to which litigation does not constitute an antitrust violation in its own right. In similar contexts in recent years, U.S. courts have consistently not deemed the enforcement of injunctions to be covered by Noerr-Pennington. The difference between SEPs and non-SEPs is also at issue (but hasn't been addressed yet by a court of law) in Qualcomm's German cases against Apple, but the heart of the issue is not a FRAND licensing commitment and the related rights of third-party beneficiaries: it's all about forcing competitors like Intel out of a market.

Qualcomm's timing-related arguments appear potentially more interesting to me than the other points it makes, but Qualcomm does contradict itself in that context. Qualcomm says:

"Here, any possible injury to Plaintiffs depends upon an attenuated chain of events transpiring. The exclusion order must issue, the presidential review period must pass, the investigation must result in actual exclusion of the accused iPhones, and the exclusion order must leave Apple with no reasonable opportunity to 'design around' the patents at issue. Such an attenuated 'chain of inferences' cannot confer standing."

Apart from the fact that everything on that list is precisely what Qualcomm is pursuing (it naturally wants to prevail, it would seek to dissuade the Trump Administration from a veto, and it seeks leverage from patents that it hopes cannot be designed around, at least not without incurring a prohibitive cost), Qualcomm itself blames those consumers in the timing context for not having brought their motion for a preliminary antisuit injunction a year ago--but consumers argue that there was a possibility at the time of Qualcomm's case not making any headway, and only now that the ITC staff has lately recommended (at the ITC hearing) to hold Apple in violation of one Qualcomm patent, there was a clear and present danger of anticompetitive effects and, therefore, consumers believe their motion was warranted.

From an industry point of view, the consumers' reply brief contains some very interesting quotes from the aforementioned ITC hearing, showing that even Qualcomm's own expert witnesses had no way of denying that Intel's efforts to compete with Qualcomm in the mobile baseband chipset market are good for innovation and choice (this post continues below the document):

18-07-19 Consumers' Reply in Support of PI Motion by Florian Mueller on Scribd

The most interesting passages of the reply brief are about the question of whether the fact that Intel is at least trying hard to compete with Qualcomm in the mobile baseband chipset market benefits consumers. At the recent ITC hearing, ITC staff lawyer Lisa Murray said:

"If Intel is taken out of the 5G race, this would slow the pace of U.S. innovation."

That assessment, which is actually just common sense, will serve as a silver bullet in the further proceedings.

But even Qualcomm's own expert witnesses in the ITC proceedings felt forced to concede that Intel's competing baseband chipsets make an important difference:

• One Qualcomm expert conceded that the Intel-based iPhone "is the only top-tier phone that currently uses a competing company's chip."

• A Qualcomm expert also agreed that the "two premium chipset providers based right here in the U.S. are Qualcomm and Intel" and that "every top-echelon smartphone that could potentially serve as a consumer substitute for iPhones blocked from the U.S. uses Qualcomm’s modem chip, with the exception of some Samsung phones that use chips built in-house."

• And here comes the most impressive passage from the expert witness testimony:

  "Q. In fact, you agree that having Intel as a competitor in that market is good for competition; correct? A. I do agree. Q. Having Intel as a competitor in that premium chipset market is good for quality of chipsets; correct? A. Generally competition is good, yeah. Q. And competition from Intel in particular is good; correct? A. Yes. Q. It's good for pricing; correct? A. Yes. Q. It's good for innovation; correct? A. Yes. Q. Good for innovation as we move into 5G; right? A. Yes. Q. Which is an absolutely critical market for the country as a whole; correct? A. Certainly for Qualcomm, yeah. We believe it is, yeah. Q. And it's good to have Qualcomm in that market; right? A. Yeah, that's right. Q. And it's good to have Intel there too? A. Yes. Q. It's good for the public? A. I agree. Q. Good for the public interest? A. I agree."

  "Good for the public interest" to have not only Qualcomm but also Intel in that market--quite an important concession.

• One last quote:

  "Two companies competing in this premium baseband chipset market in the U.S. is better than one monopolist for the public interest; correct? A. Well, as a general proposition, yes."

Unlike Samsung, Intel supplies other companies with its baseband chipsets and would like to sell to as many customers as possible, with Apple being its key reference customer. The consumers' reply brief notes that "only the AT&T Samsung Galaxy S6 devices contain an Exynos System-on-a-Chip" (Exynos is Samsung's mobile chipset brand), while "[t]he Verizon and Sprint Samsung devices contain Qualcomm chips."

In light of all of that, it's not hard to see why Qualcomm would like to force Intel out of the market as soon as possible. But what follows from the above admissions by Qualcomm's own expert witnesses is that this would be bad for innovation and harm consumers in two respects (less innovation and higher prices).

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In today's opposition to a Qualcomm motion to dismiss the FTC's antitrust complaint, the FTC says "[o]ther chipmakers may not wish to sue Qualcomm for a number of reasons, including fear of countersuit for infringement, escalation, litigation fees, disrupted relationships with OEMs [...]." While all of that can affect a chipmaker's calculus, the situation is far worse for device makers: they have to fear massive disruption should Qualcomm cease to supply its chipsets to them. Also, Qualcomm's rebate deals (that effectively result in some patent royalties being paid back) appear to be tied to total abstention from any kind of antitrust action against Qualcomm. All in all, it's like a strangehold on an entire industry.

Without the fears described above, I'm sure Qualcomm would face even more antitrust lawsuits than it currently has to deal with (the FTC case plus complaints by Apple in several jurisdictions around the globe). It's too early to tell, but it could be that Qualcomm itself will at some point conclude that certain practices (such as entering into agreements under which other companies are not allowed to take antitrust action) aren't advisable. Courts and competition enforcers now get to see those contracts and they learn about other ways in which Qualcomm tries to prevent those affected by its conduct from complaining. Regardless of legality and enforceability (important questions, but this is not the time and place to address them), what will judges and regulators think? This is psychological, not legal, but common sense suggests that someone who goes to extreme lengths to prevent others from raising a whole category (antitrust) of issues may really have something to hide.

After the FTC sued Qualcomm in January, Apple also brought a complaint, followed up by parallel complaints in other jurisdictions. At this point, Apple is still the only private-sector plaintiff against Qualcomm on antitrust grounds (not the first one, but the only one at the moment). But Apple is not alone among device makers. In a clear sign of how widespread concerns over Qualcomm's practices are, major automotive and information technology companies wrote an open letter to President Trump about the Qualcomm matter, urging the Trump Administration to pursue the antitrust case in the Northern District of California. And now Samsung has gone a very meaningful step further than answering questions from the Korea Fair Trade Commission: Samsung has just filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the FTC's opposition to Qualcomm's motion to dismiss the antitrust complaint (this post continues below the document):

17-05-12 Samsung Amicus Brief Iso FTC Opp to QCOM m2d by Florian Mueller on Scribd

For formal reasons, Samsung also had to request permission to file that brief. Since Qualcomm doesn't even object, that permission will hardly be withheld.

The two-pronged nature of the competitive harm Samsung has suffered at Qualcomm's hands is reflected by the legal entities making the submission: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (the world's largest mobile device maker) and Samsung Semiconductor (a chipset maker allegedly kept out of the wireless baseband chipset market, at least with respect to certain markets, by Qualcomm's behavior, which appears to have to do with some old contracts as well as the way Qualcomm leverages its patents).

Apple and Samsung are doing the industry at large, and (by extension) consumers, a great service. They are doing what many others presumably would like to do but don't dare. But a few years ago, Samsung was aggressively asserting FRAND-pledged standard-essential patents against Apple, and now it's actually citing Judge Koh herself (who is presiding over FTC v. Qualcomm as well as two Apple v. Samsung cases) on the "legal distinction between a normal patent—to which antitrust market power is generally not conferred on the patent owner, and a patent incorporated into a standard—to which antitrust market power may be conferred on the patent owner." When Judge Koh wrote this, Samsung was trying to gain undue leverage from its SEPs. But those efforts came to an end, and in any event, companies can cite decisions even if the shoe was on the other foot at the time.

In the following sentence from the request for permission to file a brief, the two Samsung entities are explaining what they bring to the table as "friends of the court":

"As a Qualcomm licensee ([Samsung Electronics'] handset manufacturing business) and an excluded competitor ([Samsung Semiconductor's] chipset sales arm, to which Qualcomm refuses to grant a license to make and sell licensed chipsets), proposed amici are uniquely positioned to assist the Court in understanding the impact of Qualcomm's conduct on competition in the upstream market to make and sell chipsets and in the downstream handset market."

In the amicus brief itself, Samsung stresses this role of a dual victim as well:

"Samsung, which employs approximately 17,000 people in the United States, is both Qualcomm's customer (as a handset supplier) and Qualcomm's potential competitor (as a manufacturer and potential seller of chipsets). In both capacities, Samsung has directly experienced, and been directly harmed by, the exclusionary conduct alleged in the FTC's Complaint [...]: Qualcomm refuses to license its SEPs on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory ('FRAND') terms so that Samsung can make and can sell licensed chipsets."

Samsung explains that licensing "all comers" (including rival chipset makers) is an essential part of the standardization bargain (FRAND licensing commitment in exchange for having one's technologies included in a standard). By not doing so (and by seeking supra-FRAND royalties from device makers), "Qualcomm not only violated FRAND but its conduct excluded potential competitors (like Samsung) and harmed consumers."

The Korea Fair Trade Commission is also concerned about Qualcomm's dealings with device makers as well as the ways in which Qualcomm prevents Samsung's chipset business from competing with it. Footnote 11 of Samsung's amicus brief points to a Qualcomm SEC filing and notes that "Qualcomm reports it has over 300 licensees, none of which are chipset rivals."

Probably the most important chipset rival that should get a FRAND license to Qualcomm's patents is (with the greatest respect for Samsung's huge semiconductor business) Intel. And while I was writing this post, Intel also submitted an amicus brief in support of the FTC. With so much going on, I'm going to need more time to digest all of this, but I will do a follow-up next week.

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When routinely checking for Twitter news about Qualcomm's antitrust issues, I found a job ad for an antitrust counsel at Qualcomm. Seriously, if you're an antitrust lawyer looking for a job, this might be one of the most interesting places to be in the months and years ahead. While some secondary issues such as a case brought over oversight duties go away from time to time, various regulators on multiple continents are currently doing everything to provide job security for San Diego-based antitrust attorneys:

Three months after a Korean antitrust ruling against Qualcomm, which was appreciated by industry groups on both sides of the Atlantic, another antitrust front in Qualcomm's multi-front, cross-jurisdictional fight against regulators and device makers has become known: the Korea Fair Trade Commission's (KFTC) concerns are apparently not limited to Qualcomm's licensing terms in general but also Qualcomm's practice (since 1993) of allegedly preventing Samsung from selling its Exynos wireless baseband chips, with CDMA (code division multiple access) technology, to other companies. I read about it on AndroidAuthority, which quotes Qualcomm's denial:

"Qualcomm has never stood in the way of Samsung selling chips to third parties, and nothing in our agreements has ever prevented Samsung from doing so. Any statement to the contrary is false."

At first sight, that denial appears to be complete and clear, but at a closer look it doesn't convince me. Apart from the fact that Qualcomm obviously could never admit to totally anticompetitive behavior (restriction of competition), in this case going back to an agreement signed in 1993 and failed negotiations a few years ago, the denial merely says that Samsung could somehow have sold chips to third parties, but not that Samsung could have sold, for example, CDMA-capable chips to third parties.

As AndroidAuthority notes, Qualcomm sued a Chinese Samsung customer (Meizu), which built some devices incorporating Samsung's Exynos chipset, and I agree with AndroidAuthority that "we have to wonder why the Korean giant only sells its mobile SoCs to one small company in China" (in light of Samsung's large customer base for other types of chipsets).

One of the things I learned from Apple's complaint against Qualcomm was that Qualcomm withheld "rebates" claiming, among other things, that Apple had persuaded Samsung to complain about Qualcomm's conduct to South Korea's antitrustauthority. Now that a competition enforcer has concluded that Qualcomm anticompetitively kept Samsung (for the most part) out of the baseband chipset market, it takes more than an incredible stretch of the imagination to believe that Samsung needed to be persuaded by Apple. By the way, Apple and Samsung can soon celebrate the 6th anniversary of the first Apple v. Samsung patent infringement action (the first California case, which among other types of intellectual property rights also involves design patents and still hasn't been settled or definitively decided). I'm mentioning this because it additionally--though the fact that Samsung was apparently harmed by Qualcomm in two respects (as a device maker and as a supplier of components) is the strongest point in this context--makes it hard to believe that Apple basically talked Samsung into taking action against Qualcomm. Apple and Samsung are rivals in the marketplace, they're adversaries in the courtroom, and while I like both companies' products and admire both companies in different ways, I've also criticized both of them at different times (since Samsung withdrew its standard-essential patent assertions but had--and still has--to fight against patentee overcompensation, I've largely agreed with Samsung in recent years, but before that happened, I was mostly on Apple's side and throughout all those years I usually agreed with Apple to the extent that it was a defendant).

Just this week it became known that Samsung will ship its next flagship Android phone, the S8, in two variants, one incorporating Samsung's own Exynos chipsets and another one with Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip. I read on Twitter that the Exynos version of the S8 is going to be sold in certain markets but not in the U.S., where Qualcomm probably has a lot more leverage based on its CDMA patent portfolio. That is a pity if certain benchmarks, which appear to show a major advantage for the Exynos variant, are true.

The plot is thickening with respect to Qualcomm's two mutually-reinforcing monopolies, and while Apple's antitrust cases against Qualcomm in three jurisdictions are at this stage the best source of information with respect to Qualcomm's practices, Samsung has even been affected in two roles (as a device maker and as a chipset maker), so the longer this takes, the more we'll likely learn about how Qualcomm acquired and held onto its monopoly power (see another AndroidAuthority article: "A lack of alternatives to Qualcomm is hurting the ecosystem").

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