Against all odds, considering how tough has the European Commisionеr Margrethe Vestager been with the crackdown on various Big Tech shenanigans, Qualcomm has wiggled out of a $1 billion fine on accusations it has been unlawfully incentivizing Apple to use its LTE modems at the expense of Intel.
A number of procedural irregularities affected Qualcomm’s rights of defence and invalidate the Commission’s analysis of the conduct alleged against Qualcomm. The Commission did not provide an analysis which makes it possible to support the findings that the payments concerned had actually reduced Apple’s incentives to switch to Qualcomm’s competitors in order to obtain supplies of LTE chipsets for certain iPad models to be launched in 2014 and 2015.
The Court’s decision may put a monkey wrench in the European Commission’s (EC) crusade against Big Tech and the multibillion fines it has been imposing on the likes of Apple or Google for a good while now.
Qualcomm is not out of the woods just yet, as the EU’s antitrust regulator can still appeal to the next and final EU Court of Justice step, though they’d be unlikely to entirely overturn the lower court’s findings provided that there have been a number of procedural missteps by the EC.
