A Comparative And Economic Analysis Of The U.S. FTC’s Complaint And The Korea FTC’s Decision Against Qualcomm

By Koren W. Wong-Ervin, Douglas H. Ginsburg, Anne Layne-Farrar, Scott Robins & Ariel Slonim

On January 17, 2017, the U.S. FTC filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm based on a “monopoly broth” or course of conduct theory for alleged monopoly maintenance in certain narrowly defined baseband processor markets. In a jurisdiction on the other side of the globe, the KFTC issued an administrative decision against Qualcomm on December 28, 2016, concluding that the company employed an “unfair busine