How Qualcomm Shook Down The Cell Phone Industry For Almost 20 Years

A pretty sobering read
<https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-the-cell-phone-industry-for-almost-20-years/>:

    Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms
    requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just
    phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips.

Sound familiar?

    Judge Koh draws a direct parallel to licensing behavior that got
    Microsoft in legal trouble in the 1990s. Microsoft would offer PC
    makers a discount if they agreed to pay Microsoft a licensing fee
    for every PC sold—whether or not the PC shipped with a copy of
    MS-DOS. This effectively meant that a PC maker had to pay twice if
    it shipped a PC running a non-Microsoft operating system.

There’s a lot more--the article reads like a catalogue of gangster-like
tactics. All of which is perfectly all right under the US
interpretation of “Free Enterprise”, of course ...

Also, reading the details of how Qualcomm managed to sabotage Intel’s
efforts to develop 5G chips, it seems to me that Qualcomm is directly
responsible for the situation today where US companies are lagging
behind Chinese ones like Huawei in 5G capability.
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