The European Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation to assess whether Broadcom may be restricting competition through exclusivity practices with its set-top box and modem chipsets.
The Commission said it believes that Broadcom may be implementing a range of exclusionary practices, including (i) setting exclusive purchasing obligations, (ii) granting rebates or other advantages conditioned on exclusivity or minimum purchase requirements, (iii) product bundling, (iv) abusive IP-related strategies and (v) deliberately degrading interoperability between Broadcom products and other products.
EU law prohibits the abuse of a dominant market position to affect trade within the EU and prevent or restrict competition.
Margrethe Vestager, Commissioner in charge of competition policy, said “We suspect that Broadcom, a major supplier of components for these devices, has put in place contractual restrictions to exclude its competitors from the market. This would prevent Broadcom’s customers and, ultimately, final consumers from reaping the benefits of choice and innovation. We also intend to order Broadcom to halt its behaviour while our investigation proceeds, to avoid any risk of serious and irreparable harm to competition.”
