The 2021 holiday season is poised to top the National Retail Federation's strong growth forecast, despite supply chain disruptions, inflation, early shopping and concerns over the COVID-19 omicron variant, said NRF Chief Economist Jack Kleinhenz Friday.

The audio functionality that's at the heart of the Sonos patent fight with Google “is only a small piece” of what Google smart speakers provide, and excluding them from U.S. importation “would harm U.S. consumers and the U.S. economy,” commented the Computer & Communications Industry Association Thursday (login required) in the International Trade Commission’s 337-TA-1191 docket.

Five years from now, Walmart will be a different company, said outgoing Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs (see 2111290043) at a Wednesday analyst event, outlining the retailer’s vision to use its “flywheel” to expand advertising, marketplace, healthcare and financial services initiatives. The company grew from a supercenter business with annual revenue of $160 million in 2000 to a $560 million company going “further than the supercenter,” said the executive.

Barring an unforeseen steep drop in demand, port congestion and supply chain problems are unlikely to improve next year, and shippers should continue to expect container issues and equipment shortages, said Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen on a webinar hosted Wednesday by the freight-forwarding company. But individual shippers can act themselves to mitigate delays and high container fees, including routing shipments away from highly congested ports and minimizing empty space in containers.

Numerous House Commerce Committee members repeated calls for bipartisan action to revise Communications Decency Act Section 230 during a Wednesday Communications Subcommittee hearing, but remain far apart on the details. The proposals “aren’t identical,” but the process could lead to “bipartisan work,” said committee Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J. “Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on this issue,” said Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas.

The U.S. needs to work with global trading allies to find long-term fixes to the supply chain crisis that will transcend future American administrations, Matt Murray, senior bureau official in the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, told the Global Trade and Innovation Policy Alliance summit in a keynote Thursday. “We can’t just look at supply chain issues and say we need to fix it by Christmas because there are these short-term disruptions,” he said.

Advertisers’ spending on connected TV platforms remains much smaller than on linear TV, but the gap will narrow over the next four years, said a Wednesday eMarketer report. EMarketer’s first CTV advertising forecast in 2019 said connected TV ad revenue was a tenth of linear TV’s; by 2025, it will be more than half, it said. U.S. TV viewers will spend 80 minutes a day watching subscription over-the-top video this year, up 8.7% from 2020, it said.

The chip shortage in the auto industry spurred many GlobalFoundries automotive customers to sign long-term agreements (LTAs) with the chipmaker “to ensure supply continuity for their new products that ramp over the next three to five years,” said CEO Tom Caulfield on a Q3 earnings call Tuesday, GF’s first since going public Oct. 28. “Semiconductor is going to become the defining line for differentiation in the automotive experience,” he said.

Despite a falloff in total shopper numbers from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, the National Retail Federation is holding to its Nov. 1-Dec. 31 holiday forecast of 8.5%-10.5% year-on-year growth to $843.4 billion-$859 billion, said CEO Matthew Shay on a Tuesday wrap-up of the five-day holiday period.

At least eight models of Sony Blu-ray players, plus all PlayStation 3, PS4 and PS5 game consoles with Blu-ray drives, infringe an October 2007 patent (7,289,961) on audio watermarking from two University of Rochester engineering professors because the products come embedded with Cinavia copy protection watermark detectors, alleged a complaint Wednesday (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware.