Given the direction of antitrust law recently I was surprised to see the recent suits by AMD and (more recently) Broadcom. They left me scratching my head.

But there is an answer to my quandary.

Antitrust has become a process. It's not a goal, but a weapon in the business war.

The idea that Qualcomm has a monopoly in the mobile phone industry is laughable. It may abuse what position it has, charging chip makers like Broadcom the equivalent of an "intellectual property tax" in areas which use CDMA (and its variants). But GSM is the major world standard. It would be like calling the Apple Macintosh a monopoly.

The Broadcom antitrust suit comes right after it filed a patent suit against Qualcomm, accusing it of violating Broadcom patents regarding delivery of content to mobile phones.

The first shot didn't open up the Qualcomm ship, maybe the second will. All lawyers on deck!

Any patent or antitrust suit requires an enormous amount of expensive legal help and executive time to defend. It also costs money to prosecute, but when you're trying to force open a business relationship you might mentally call this a marketing expense. For the defense in such suits the expenses come right off the bottom line. Thus the idea is not to win in the court, but in the boardroom, to force an agreement on your terms through the deployment of lawyers.

I frankly find this to be very abusive. It's true that, in terms of market cap, Qualcomm is worth five times more than Broadcom. But Broadcom is worth over $10 billion, which may be my ultimate point.

It's not personal. It's not even principle. It's business.

And if a smaller American company came to either of these two outfits, with a better mousetrap and the intent of competing, either one or both would send out lawyers to squash them.

This limits the ability of new American businesses to compete, either in this market or the world. It's what the antitrust laws were designed to prevent.

But these days, that kind of abuse is just business.