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Anderman, Steven --- "Industrial Standards and Technology Pools: A Regulatory Challenge for EU Competition Law" [2011] ELECD 754; in Drexl, Josef; Grimes, S. Warren; Jones, A. Clifford; Peritz, J.R. Rudolph; Swaine, T. Edward (eds), "More Common Ground for International Competition Law?" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: More Common Ground for International Competition Law?

Editor(s): Drexl, Josef; Grimes, S. Warren; Jones, A. Clifford; Peritz, J.R. Rudolph; Swaine, T. Edward

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849803946

Section: Chapter 14

Section Title: Industrial Standards and Technology Pools: A Regulatory Challenge for EU Competition Law

Author(s): Anderman, Steven

Number of pages: 7

Extract:

14. Industrial standards and
technology pools: A regulatory
challenge for EU competition law
Steven Anderman

1 INTRODUCTION

Producing industrial standard products through patent and technology
pools has on occasion dramatically awakened competition concerns on
both sides of the Atlantic in recent years. The most obvious examples in
the EU are the recent but now closed cases of Rambus1 and Qualcomm2 and
the interchange between the European Commission and ETSI in relation
to IPCom's role in the UMTS pool after it accepted Bosch's commitment
to a FRAND license of essential patents.3 These cases all raised specific
questions about the role of obligations within patent or technology pools.
However, away from the more dramatic incidents that have occasioned
investigations by the Commission, the development of technology pools
as an autonomous process of collaboration amongst competitors pro-
ducing considerable innovative benefit with occasional risks of anticom-
petitive harm raises demanding questions concerning how the innovative
and therefore procompetitive benefits of such collaborations should be

1 The Commission adopted a `commitments' decision in respect of Rambus

Inc. which, inter alia, put a cap on royalties it could charge the JEDEC SSO for
certain patents for `Dynamic Random Access Memory Chips' (DRAMS). See
`Antitrust: Commission accepts commitments from Rambus lowering memory
chip royalty rates', Press Release IP/09/1987, 9 December 2009), http://europa.
eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/1897 (accessed December
2010).
2 Commission, `Antitrust: Commission closes formal proceedings against

Qualcomm', Press Release MEMO/09/516, 24 November 2009, ...