There is a world of difference between:

"Buy five thousand and I'll give you 10% off"

"Buy five thousand and don't buy from my rivals and I'll give you 10% off"

IIRC from the suit, Intel never spelled it outright that you couldn't buy AMD, they just provided sales targets required for discounts/marketing partnerships (which just paid money to the retailer for hanging up Intel advertising) with different purchase amounts for different retailers, and if the retailer started selling AMD, they'd hike up the amount until they were no longer selling AMD.

Ok, but how would they know how many the company was selling, and how much to mark up there amount until they weren't getting the discount?

Spirit of the law and intent are more important than actual wording. At last that's how it should work, and did in that case.

I would assume it to be more like:

"Buy five thousand and I'll give you 10% off"

"Buy five thousand for the next few years, and only from us, and I'll give you 20% off, because now we know we'll have cashflow for years"

But aren't exclusivity contracts commonplace? Like a contract stating "We'll buy some large amount of product at a discounted price and only purchase from you for the next some number of years." Like Qualcomm could give Apple a lower price now, because decrease in revenue is offset by the promise of future discounted revenue. I don't understand why that's illegal.

There's a different between getting a discount "if you buy a lot of X" and "if you don't buy any X from our competitors". The latter in anti-competitive.

Why?

I’m not being coy; I don’t understand. Isn’t “we will take less money from you if you don’t work with our competitors” one of the cornerstones of a competitive market? I’d understand if the payment went to a corporate officer to act at odds with the interests of his employer, but I guess I don’t see how this is distinct from any other contract to be a sole distributor, sole provider, etc. Certainly their competition could kill such a deal by just beating the price cut?

As long as no-one has a dominant market position, such a deal is completely legal and there is nothing wrong with it.

It used to be legal regardless of your market share, but during the tail end of the Gilded age, we learned the hard way that once someone gets big enough that they can kill the business of their customers/suppliers by refusing to sell to/buy from them, they can stop playing by the rules of a free market where they compete with others to provide a better product or service at a cheaper price, and instead entrench themself as a permanent monopoly that gets monopoly rents and does not have to fairly compete.

So, antitrust laws were born, which limit the kind of actions you can take if you have a commanding market position.

> Isn’t “we will take less money from you if you don’t work with our competitors” one of the cornerstones of a competitive market?

No. "We take less money for our products than our competitor" is a competitive market.

There was a clawback clause associated with the discount:

> The agreement made clear that Qualcomm would cease these payments, if Apple commercially launched a device with a chipset supplied by a rival. Furthermore, for most of the time the agreement was in place, Apple would have had to return to Qualcomm a large part of the payments it had received in the past, if it decided to switch suppliers. This meant that Qualcomm's rivals were denied the possibility to compete effectively for Apple's significant business, no matter how good their products were. They were also denied business opportunities with other customers that could have followed from securing Apple as a customer.

The difference is market share. If you have a dominant market share and do deals for exclusivity then you are preventing competition from happening.

Well, if there weren't any difference, why would Qualcomm put it in the contract?

Also, no, there are many reasons why the competition couldn't beat them. Be it that Qualcomm is selling at a loss, simply to kill the competition, or be it that the competition can only supply a smaller amount than the buyer needs, but at a lower price. In a competitive market, that smaller supplier could earn money to gradually grow, but the headstart of the established supplier can be used to keep the smaller supplier unable to ever sell.

Did you read GP’s comment at all? It depends on the strings attached to the discount.

I have. I just don't see how it's a bribe. This in part, because if Apple essentially ended up being 80% of the market, I don't see how one business relationship can be seen as monopolising.

Part of the reason Apple agreed to such a deal is because having a longer term contract will give them a better per unit price.

If you follow that line of thinking and Qualcomm gets a fine because of that, the commission should also force Apple to purchase LTE chips from multiple suppliers, because they can force the price down so much due to the fact they're 80% of the market. It goes both ways.

"In 2011, Qualcomm signed an agreement with Apple, committing to make significant payments to Apple on condition that the company would exclusively use Qualcomm chipsets in its "iPhone" and "iPad" devices. In 2013, the term of the agreement was extended to the end of 2016."

Does it still sound okay to you?

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-421_en.htm

That's not the part of the release that's not okay, since paying money to Apple in exchange for use of its chips is indistinguishable from Qualcomm giving Apple a large discount. The part that is not okay is the clawback clause:

> The agreement made clear that Qualcomm would cease these payments, if Apple commercially launched a device with a chipset supplied by a rival. Furthermore, for most of the time the agreement was in place, Apple would have had to return to Qualcomm a large part of the payments it had received in the past, if it decided to switch suppliers. This meant that Qualcomm's rivals were denied the possibility to compete effectively for Apple's significant business, no matter how good their products were. They were also denied business opportunities with other customers that could have followed from securing Apple as a customer.

All fine unless you have a monopoly.

In European anti-trust law, excluding competitors (or restricting anything regarding third parties) is illegal regardless of your market share. You might come under closer scrutiny if you have a quasi-monopoly, but the behavior is very much not "fine" regardless.

You'd have to do better than throwing a blanket statement. Do you have any references to quote?