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Back in 2010, the software-defined modem company Icera lodged a complaint against Qualcomm, alleging that the manufacturer had engaged in unfair and possibly illegal actions related to modem sales and market dominance. Not much has happened in the intervening four years, but now there’s rumor that the European Commission might revisit the claim, sparked by Chinese antitrust investigations and the recent upheld win over Chipzilla.

One thing is certain — Qualcomm’s market share has exploded in recent years. Here’s the market share split from 2009, the year before Icera filed its complaint:

And here’s the market in 2013:

That 94% blue is Qualcomm, with 6% devoted to everybody else. The situation has already changed since this graph was made; Broadcom has quit the industry altogether. According to Icera’s complaint, Qualcomm reportedly used preferential pricing and bundling agreements to drive enormous adoption of its 28nm modem technology.

Is Qualcomm another Intel?

First, yes, it’s absolutely possible that Qualcomm has used shady business practices to drive adoption of its own modem technology. It’s also possible that it has a trove of patents it aggressively asserted to hurt the adoption of competing solutions, or that it utilized its market position to further entrench its dominance. One difference between the EU courts and the US system is that in the EU, regulators need only find that a company abused its power — they don’t have to prove consumer harm.

With that said, however, there are significant differences between Intel’s ability to drive wedges into the market and Qualcomm’s ability to do the same from 2010 to the present day. Specifically, most of the companies that built 3G modems failed to bring 28nm modems to market to compete with Qualcomm in the first place.

With AMD, the issue in play was Intel’s ability to block AMD products from store shelves and markets. Did Qualcomm’s patent lawyers somehow block companies like Broadcom, ST-Ericsson, MediaTek, Texas Instruments, NEC/Renesas, and Infineon (now Intel) from producing the hardware in the first place? Maybe — but the handful of alternate 28nm 4G LTE modems that have come to market from other companies seem mired in technical problems, not bad business practices.

Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine that a company like Intel would be put off by hardball scare tactics from Qualcomm. The company is already losing billions of dollars a quarter to drive adoption of its platforms in mobile and could afford to subsidize the adoption of its modem technology as well. Intel could, if it wished, offer indemnity to its adopters in the event of a patent loss to Qualcomm.

We’ll have to wait for more details to see how this shakes out, but the case just isn’t as clear at this point. If Qualcomm’s shenanigans were single-handedly responsible for devastating the thriving market of 2009, we’d have expected it to come out long before now with multiple high-profile lawsuits and investigations on both sides of the pond.