By Thomas Cotter ( December 10, 2018, 2:21 PM EST) -- In a speech delivered in Palo Alto, California, on Dec. 7, the head of the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, announced that the DOJ was withdrawing its assent to the 2013 Policy Statement on Remedies for the Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments, which it issued with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.[1] During the course of the speech, Delrahim somehow managed both to praise the U.S. Supreme Court's 2006 eBay decision,[2] which limits the federal courts' authority to grant injunctions in patent (and other) cases, while also insinuating that eBay undercuts patent owners' "fundamental right" to exclusivity. He concluded the speech with a warning to standard setting organizations to avoid anything resembling collective action with regard to the licenses that SSO members commit to enter into on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory, or FRAND, terms. The result is a confusing mishmash, the primary audience for which, in my view, is not the SSOs (which have heard similar warnings from Delrahim about collective action over the past several months[3]), but rather the U.S. International Trade Commission....