"It does not serve the public to hamstring Starlink today for an Amazon satellite system that is at best several years away from operation," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted Tuesday. He responded to a CNBC reporter's tweet about SpaceX's recent FCC lobbying on its pending modification to allow more than 2,800 planned satellites to orbit at a lower altitude (see 2101250037). Amazon raised red flags about orbital overlap with its planned Kuiper constellation (see 2012040001). "The facts are simple," Amazon later blogged. "We designed the Kuiper System to avoid interference with Starlink, and now SpaceX wants to change the design of its system. Those changes not only create a more dangerous environment for collisions in space, but they also increase radio interference for customers. Despite what SpaceX posts on Twitter, it is SpaceX’s proposed changes that would hamstring competition among satellite systems. It is clearly in SpaceX’s interest to smother competition in the cradle if they can, but it is certainly not in the public’s interest."
The U.S. should help the EU "contain the immense power" of big digital companies, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday at Davos Agenda Week. For digitization to be successful, governments must tackle the darker sides of the digital world such as the storming of the U.S. Capitol, she said. The business model of online platforms "has an impact -- and not only on free and fair competition, but also on our democracies, our security and on the quality of our information ... We want it clearly laid down that internet companies take responsibility for the manner in which they disseminate, promote and remove content." The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act are intended to be "our new rulebook for our digital market" (see 2012230096), Von der Leyen said, inviting the U.S. to join the initiatives.
Despite Facebook’s ongoing promises to battle hate speech and dissemination of false information, “much needs to be done,” Wedbush's Michael Pachter wrote investors Monday. “Regulatory risk remains significant,” he said, noting that Facebook reported it acted on 22 million pieces of hate speech in Q3 and estimated 10-11 out of every 10,000 content views included hate speech. Wedbush estimates Q4 revenue of $25.4 billion, for 21% growth. The social media platform didn’t provide Q4 guidance due to COVID-19 uncertainties, but year-on-year ad revenue growth is expected to rise from Q3's 22%. Management expects strong Oculus Quest 2 sales in Q4, said the analyst. "Facebook has consistently executed on its core business model and we expect revenue to grow in correlation to the global macroeconomic outlook and associated advertising demand." It reports Q4 Wednesday.
Home data consumption slowed slightly as last year came to a close, to rates seen in the weeks leading up to COVID-19 pandemic closures, rising 18% overall in all of 2020, Comscore reported. Except for a “slight shift away from gaming consoles in favor of smart TVs in 2020, households continued to consume data in very similar ways to how they did in 2019,” said the report Friday. Data use grew across connected devices, with smart TVs, laptops, gaming consoles, smartphones, smart speakers, streaming players and tablets having strong growth from 2019. Smart TV data usage was higher every month in 2020, even before the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak in March.
The pandemic gave 5G a needed push yet slowed work on standards and deployment, said Kaniz Mahdi, VMware vice president-advanced technologies, at an IEEE webinar Thursday. The wireless industry had high expectations for 2020, "expected to be a year of transformation,” Mahdi said. “5G was expected to be the driving force,” she said: “Then COVID happened.” The transformation instead has been driven by the pandemic, which changed “the way we do our work, the way we shop … the way we are educated,” she said. For years, it wasn’t clear what “killer app” would drive 4G adoption, she said. Then came apps like Uber and Airbnb, and “you have widespread adoption of massive broadband, universal data.” 5G will enable “highly interactive collaboration” among devices, she said: Machines will become “the ultimate end user.”
The Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security is experiencing significant delays to its Huawei licensing decisions due to telework amid the pandemic, BIS' Eileen Albanese said. Communication between agencies has been hampered, leading to lengthy license adjudications and a backlog of applications, Albanese, director of the Office of National Security and Technology Transfer Controls, told a Friday Massachusetts Export Center event. “COVID-19 really did have a significant impact on Huawei licenses, more so than any other group of licenses.” Kevin Wolf, an export controls lawyer with Akin Gump, said his clients have applications that have been “pending for months and months and months,” some to 2019. He said clients got a “flurry” of Huawei license denials. “It seemed as if the floodgates opened up" Thursday, he said. A BIS spokesperson said the agency is continuing to work through the applications. Huawei didn't comment Tuesday.
Pass legislation to make it harder for dominant companies to buy smaller competitors in the same market, DOJ Antitrust Division Chief Makan Delrahim said Tuesday (see 2101150067). “For firms with more than 50 percent market share in any defined market, there should be a presumption that further acquisitions in that same market are anticompetitive.” His proposal would let combining companies rebut those findings if they can show the parties “post-transaction would not be able to exercise market power” or “the anticompetitive effects of the transaction are insubstantial, or outweighed by the procompetitive benefits.” He said the top issue facing Congress and his successor involve “market integrity and market power in the increasingly concentrated digital marketplace.” So “pass legislation to introduce bright line rules and alter the burdens of proof in civil merger cases in order to effectively combat certain excessive market concentration.”
Commerce Department rules for reviewing transactions involving some foreign telecom and IT products and services would cost all 4.5 million firms possibly affected as much as $20 billion, the department says in Tuesday's Federal Register. The rule allows Commerce to step in to review any proposed, ongoing or pending ITCS goods or services transaction. The rule provides for an optional "licensing" process whereby companies can request a review of their transaction and, if approved, get safe harbor. Procedures for the licenses will be published by Commerce in 60 days, the rule said. Included in the new supply chain rules are information or communications technology used in a critical infrastructure; software, hardware and services integral to wireless local area networks, mobile networks, satellite payloads and operations and control; software or hardware that has sensitive personal data on more than 1 million U.S. customers; and software designed for communicating via the Internet used by more than that number.
Patents and trademarks motivated by “non-market factors,” such as subsidies, government mandates, “bad-faith” applications and “defensive countermeasures," can “undermine the reliability” of intellectual property “registries,” reported the Patent and Trademark Office Wednesday. The growing number of “suspect” applications filed in the U.S. from China prompted the agency to “study the reasons for this development.” Though PTO knows of no “public source information” showing what proportion of IP applications in China are motivated by subsidies, “it has observed the impact of Chinese subsidies granted for foreign trademark applications.” After Shenzhen and other cities began offering subsidies for overseas trademark applications, PTO experienced a “surge” in fraudulent applications originating in China, it said. Irregularities can abound, including narrowing the scope of “protections” available to IP owners “engaged in the legitimate sale of goods and services,” it said. “Absent consideration of the role of non-market factors, cross-border comparisons based on the raw number of trademark and patent applications risk overstating brand creation and innovation activity in China.” PTO offered no recommended remedies.
As 200 CEOs opposed the possible U.S. tariffs on Vietnamese goods, newly released November Census Bureau import statistics show Vietnam’s growing role in consumer tech. Vietnam as a sourcing country made substantial share gains the past year in product categories experiencing historic spikes in consumer demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, we found. It's most notable in smaller TV screens. U.S. importers also sourced about a fifth of smartphones from Vietnam in the year through November. Smartphone imports to the U.S. from all countries reached 21.44 million, up 1.6% from 2019. Chinese smartphone imports to the U.S. were 18.28 million, up 18%. The average such phone, at $367.30, was 27% more expensive. Vietnam shipped 2.6 million smartphones here in November, down 43%. The average at $187.87 was 24% more expensive. Tariffs on Vietnam aren't the answer to curb Hanoi's allegedly unfair devaluation of the dong against the dollar, wrote CEOs of LG, Samsung, Sony, CTA, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, Information Technology Industry Council, Internet Association and Semiconductor Industry Association and others to President Donald Trump Thursday, posted Friday in docket USTR-2020-0037. Their letter reflects widespread fear the Trump administration will rush through a Federal Register notice imposing tariffs on Vietnam, even if the duties take effect after Jan. 20. The White House didn't comment Monday.