U.S. antitrust enforcers are abandoning their lawsuit against
The
The decision formally ends litigation that began in January 2017 when the FTC, in the closing days of the Obama administration,
FTC Acting Chairwoman
“Now more than ever, the FTC and other law enforcement agencies need to boldly enforce the antitrust laws to guard against abusive behavior by dominant firms, including in high-technology markets and those that involve intellectual property,” she said.
Qualcomm said it was pleased with the agency’s decision.
“Qualcomm got to where it is today by investing tens of billions of dollars in R&D and inventing technologies used by billions of people around the world,”
When it was filed, the Qualcomm case represented one of the rare examples of U.S. antitrust officials taking action to stop allegedly anticompetitive conduct by a major company to protect its dominant position in a market.
Since then, the FTC has sued
The antitrust case against Qualcomm threatened to undermine the company’s business model. The company gets the bulk of its revenue from selling chips, but the majority of its profit from licensing the thousands of patents it owns on technology that underpins how modern phone systems work.
The FTC accused Qualcomm of abusing its dominant position to extract excessive licensing fees from phone makers.
(Updates with Qualcomm statement, in seventh paragraph)
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