You're not paying attention if you think Nvidia is just a "graphics company". As a chip supplier they are known to be aggressive to the point of bullying and their negotiations tend towards the extortion end of the business spectrum.
I like Nvidia (because I don't have to work with them), but I don't think they are the right steward for ARM in any way.
So the headline should read: Nvidia too much of an asshole to own ARM? Let’s update our laws too. I’m serious, if we don’t want companies to be assholes then we’d need to regulate how they negotiate and a lot of other things.
Caring only about laws and not about reputation of being a good ecosystem partner to others is a recipe for others to look elsewhere. NVIDIA has a really bad rep due to its arrogant behaviour towards customers and other companies (Linux project, Apple). Maybe this ARM drawn out saga is just karma coming back from that.
Nvidia has burned its bridges with a lot of companies over the years (Microsoft comes to mind, i'm pretty sure they will never use an nvidia chip inside an xbox ever again)
For many different reasons too ! Some were a bit petty/misguided :
- Microsoft was mostly contractual on the Xbox, Nvidia didn't want to lower the price of the chips over the lifespan of the 1st Xbox which was a huge no-no. And some technical people also had a terrible experience (some people in the DirectX team had strong thoughts about working with Nvidia).
- Sony was mostly about terrible tech support and not wanting to share enough technical details which hampered AAA devs a whole lot, to the point most ended up using the SPUs in very creative (and technically fascinating) ways to compensate (the GTA V engine on PS3 was truly impressive in that regard).
- There were some minor (but acrimonious) back and forth with Apple over a failing gen of GPUs (G80s if memory serves), but the large fallout came for the same reason as for the rest of the mobile industry : the Kepler licensing initiative.
Long story short, Nvidia tried to assert patents on mobile GPU (ala Microsoft on Android, as a way to "sell" their exit of the mobile market to investors). They then sued Samsung and Qualcomm [1]. Samsung countersued Nvidia, which had to settle as Samsung was close to winning a ban on imports from some Nvidia products [2]. Many of the patents Nvidia tried to assert were thrown out and they had a terrible legal time.
The damage that ill thought strategy did to Nvidia is hard to measure but there's not a single mobile company that wanted that acquisition to go forward and many are probably quite relieved after this.
Companies are sociopaths by definition. You can't stop them being assholes, what you can do is regulate their asshole-ness so that it minimizes that effect on consumers and markets in general.
"Free trade" and "Free markets" has never meant "totally unregulated".
That's completely flawed reasoning that ignores the actual purpose of those things, which is to encourage increased/better supply of products and services to consumers at the best possible price.
I like Nvidia (because I don't have to work with them), but I don't think they are the right steward for ARM in any way.