.......The long saga of standardization skullduggery relating to the adoption of the Joint Electronic Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) standard for computer memory—specifically, for SDRAM technology—is beginning to wind down. It is now almost at the last stage—the FTC has filed a certiorari petition with the Supreme Court to obtain appellate review of an adverse court of appeals decision overturning its order against Rambus. As earlier Micro Law columns detailed, Rambus’s alleged skullduggery escapade played out this way: Rambus duped JEDEC into incorporating patented Rambus technology into JEDEC’s standard. JEDEC was deceived into thinking the technology was unpatented or at least available for licensing on reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) terms. Rambus changed pending patent applications to cover technology incorporated into the standard. Once the industry implemented the standard, Rambus ‘‘demanded stiff royalties from makers of the great majority of computer memory chips,’’ and began to enforce against users of the standard the Rambus patents covering the standard. The FTC learned of these events and sued Rambus for what it called ‘‘Rambus’s scheme to acquire monopoly power by deceiving’’ JEDEC. After a lengthy proceeding, the FTC ordered Rambus to stop enforcing the patents against users of the JEDEC standard to compel them to pay any higher royalties than would have been agreed to if the royalties had been set before the standard was adopted (that is, at a time when JEDEC could have standardized on different technology if Rambus demanded too high a royalty). DC Circuit ruling Rambus then appealed to the federal courts—in this case, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (the DC Circuit). The DC Circuit took a jaundiced view of the FTC’s proceeding against Rambus. The court said that it was guided by two antitrust principles. The first was that, to be condemned as exclusionary, a monopolist’s conduct must have ‘‘anticompetitive effect’’ (that is, it must harm the competitive process and thereby harm consumers). Second, the FTC bears the burden of proving the anticompetitive effect of the challenged conduct. The court concluded that the FTC had not adequately established that Rambus’s standardization skullduggery had an anticompetitive effect, because the FTC’s chain of reasoning was faulty. The FTC had found that, but for Rambus’s deceits and skullduggery, JEDEC would have had two choices available to it. It could have