Qualcomm allegedly bribed Apple into not making a WiMAX iPhone

[Ry]

http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/17/14303910/qualcomm-allegedly-bribed-apple-wimax-iphone-ft-complaint

Here’s the FTC’s complaint:

Under a 2007 agreement, Qualcomm agreed to rebate to Apple royalties that Qualcomm received from Apple’s contract manufacturers in excess of a specified per-handset cap. Qualcomm’s payment obligations were conditioned upon, among other things, Apple not selling or licensing a handset implementing the WiMax standard, a prospective fourth-generation cellular standard championed by Intel and opposed by Qualcomm.

WiMAX is dead now, but in 2007, this was a Big Deal: Sprint had just made an enormous bet on beating the market to 4G speeds by deploying a WiMAX network in 2008, ahead of LTE, and Intel still had an opportunity to make a mark in mobile. Paying off Apple allowed Qualcomm to keep the iPhone off a faster network until LTE was ready — and in the process effectively kneecapped Sprint, which invested billions into a network that couldn’t support the future iPhone roadmap.

 

[94wolfpack]

FTC says paying Apple rebates is anti-competitive and QC should be fined. Then Apple sues QC after QC stopped paying the rebate. Kind of funny really, seems like only one of the suits could win. ?!? If the FTC wins, then it would seem Apple would be saying they are suing QC for stopping what was found to be an illegal activity. Or is this logic flawed?

 

[cardboard60]

Don't care what apple does.
Don't like their phones.