Throwing Out the FTC’s Suit Against Qualcomm Moves Antitrust Law in the Wrong Direction

The government bestows temporary monopolies in the form of patents to promote future innovation and economic growth. Antitrust law empowers the government to break up monopolies when their power is so great and their conduct is so corrosive of competition that they can dictate market outcomes without worrying about their rivals. In theory, patent and antitrust law serve the same goals—promoting economic and technological development—but in practice, they often butt heads.

The relationship between antitrust and patent law is especially thorny when it comes to “standards-essential patents” or “SEPs.” These are patents that cover technologies considered “essential” for implementing standards—agreed-upon rules and protocols that allow different manufacturers’ devices to communicate with each other using shared network infrastructure. Some technology standards become standards by achieving widespread adoption through market forces (the QWERTY keyboard layout is on example). But many are the result of extensive deliberation and cooperation among industry players (including competitors), like the MP3 audio compression and 3G wireless communication standards.

Standards can enhance competition and consumer choice, but they also massively inflate the value of patents deemed essential to the standard, and give their owners the power to sue companies that implement the standard for money damages or injunctions to block them from using their SEPs. When standards cover critical features like wireless connectivity, SEP owners wield a huge amount of “hold-up” power because their patents allow them to effectively block access to the standard altogether. That lets them charge unduly large tolls to anyone who wants to implement the standard.

To minimize that risk, standard-setting organizations typically require companies that want their patented technology incorporated into a standard to promise in advance to license their SEPs to others on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. But that promise strikes at a key tension between antitrust and patent law: patent owners have no obligation to let anyone use technology their patent covers, but to get those technologies incorporated into standards, patent owners usually have to promise that they will give permission to anyone who wants to implement the standard as long as they pay a reasonable license fee. 

Qualcomm is one of the most important and dominant companies in the history of wireless communication standards. It is a multinational conglomerate that has owned patents on every major wireless communication standard since its first CDMA patent in 1985, and it participates in the standard-setting organizations that define those standards. Qualcomm is somewhat unique in that it not only licenses SEPs, but also supplies the modem chips used by a wide range of devices. These include chips that implement wireless communication standards, which lie at the heart of every mobile computing device.

Although Qualcomm promised to license its SEPs (including patents essential to CDMA, 3G, 4G, and 5G) on FRAND terms, its conduct has to many looked unfair, unreasonable, and highly discriminatory. In particular, Qualcomm has drawn scrutiny for bundling tens of thousands of patents together—including many that are not standard-essential—and offering portfolio-only licenses no matter what licensees actually want or need; refusing to sell modem chips to anyone without a SEP license and threatening to withhold chips from companies trying to negotiate different license terms; refusing to license anyone other than original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs); and insisting on royalties calculated as a percentage of the sale price of a handset sold to end users for hundreds of dollars, despite the minimal contribution of any particular patent to the retail value.

In 2017, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued Qualcomm for violating both sections of the Sherman Antitrust Act by engaging in a number of anticompetitive SEP licensing practices. In May 2019, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed with the FTC, identifying numerous instances of Qualcomm’s unlawful, anticompetitive conduct in a comprehensive 233-page opinion. We were pleased to see the FTC take action and the district court credit the overwhelming evidence that Qualcomm’s conduct is corrosive to market-based competition and threatens to cement Qualcomm’s dominance for years to come.

But this month, a panel of judges from the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unanimously overturned the district court’s decision, reasoning that Qualcomm’s conduct was “hypercompetitive” but not “anticompetitive,” and therefore not a violation of antitrust law. To reach that result, the Ninth Circuit made the patent grant more powerful and antitrust law weaker than ever.

According to the Ninth Circuit, patent owners don’t have a duty to let anyone use what their patent covers, and therefore Qualcomm had no duty to license its SEPs to anyone. But that framing requires ignoring the promises Qualcomm made to license its SEPs on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms—promises that courts in this country and around the world have consistently enforced. It also means ignoring antitrust principles like the essential facilities doctrine, which limits the ability of a monopolist with hold-up power over an essential facility (like a port) to shut out rivals. Instead, the Ninth Circuit held rather simplistically that a duty to deal could arise only if the monopolist had provided access, and then reversed its policy.

But even when Qualcomm restricted its licensing policies in critical ways, the Ninth Circuit found reasons to approve those restrictions. For example, Qualcomm stopped licensing its patents to chip manufacturers and started licensing them only to OEMs. This had a major  benefit: it let Qualcomm charge a much higher royalty rate based on the high retail price of the end user devices, like smartphones and tablets, that OEMs make and sell. If Qualcomm had continued to license to chip suppliers, its patents would be “exhausted” once the chips were sold to OEMs, extinguishing Qualcomm’s right to assert its patents and control how the chips were used.

Patent exhaustion is a century-old doctrine that protects the rights of consumers to use things they buy without getting the patent owner’s permission again and again. Patent exhaustion is important because it prevents price-gouging, but also because it protects space for innovation by letting people use things they buy freely, including to build innovations of their own. The doctrine thus helps patent law serve its underlying goal—promoting economic growth and innovation. In other words, the doctrine of exhaustion is baked into the patent grant; it is not optional. Nevertheless, the Ninth Circuit wholeheartedly approved of Qualcomm’s efforts to avoid exhaustion—even when that meant cutting off access to previous licensees (chip-makers) in ways that let Qualcomm charge far more in licensing fees than its SEPs could possibly have contributed to the retail value of the final product.

It makes no sense that Qualcomm could contract around a fundamental principle like patent exhaustion, but at the same time did not assume any antitrust duty to deal under these circumstances. Worse, it’s harmful for the economy, innovation, and consumers. Unfortunately, the kind of harm that antitrust law recognizes is limited to harm affecting “competition” or the “competitive process.” Antitrust law, at least as the Ninth Circuit interprets it, doesn’t do nearly enough to address the harm downstream consumers experience when they pay inflated prices for high-tech devices, and miss out on innovation that might have developed from fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing practices.

We hope the FTC sticks to its guns and asks the Ninth Circuit to go en banc and reconsider this decision. Otherwise, antitrust law will become an even weaker weapon against innovation-stifling conduct in technology markets.