If the FTC withdraws from its joint vertical merger guidelines with DOJ, it could cause friction between the two agencies and fuel legal arguments for opponents, former commission officials said in interviews last week. Commissioners are expected to withdraw from the agency's June 2020 joint guidelines with DOJ at a commission meeting Wednesday (see 2109080060). The guidelines would remain in effect for DOJ unless the department also acts.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is willing to consider ways to accelerate its emerging and foundational technology control effort but won't abandon its multilateral efforts just to publish controls more quickly, a top official told a bipartisan congressional commission on China Wednesday. Acting BIS Undersecretary Jeremy Pelter acknowledged criticism that the agency is moving too slowly on the congressionally mandated export control effort but defended the work BIS has done so far and said the agency doesn’t plan to change course.

After reports last week signaling the debut of the first “Amazon-built” TVs (see 2109030041), Amazon unveiled the inaugural Amazon Fire TV family Thursday, including flagship 65- and 75-inch models with Dolby Vision.

Whole Foods Market will begin testing its Just Walk Out technology as a checkout option in stores in Washington, D.C.’s Glover Park neighborhood, and in Sherman Oaks, California, next year, blogged Dilip Kumar, vice president-physical retail and technology.

Moving to open radio access networks for 5G will take time, with potential problems looming, speakers told a Fierce Wireless virtual event Wednesday. Verizon sees virtual RANs as happening first, with ORAN to follow. The FCC is looking at how it could promote ORAN (see 2108270039).

Tough comparisons with 2020, when consumer TV demand skyrocketed in the fourth full month of COVID-19 lockdowns, were evident in TV import trends for July, as accessed Wednesday through the International Trade Commission’s DataWeb portal. Unit imports plunged by double digits from a year earlier in all screen size classifications and from all major countries of origin, and the significant price inflation in finished sets shipped to the U.S. reflected the record-high costs of panels and other components.

Temporary spikes in streaming activity due to lockdowns early in the COVID-19 pandemic “have turned out to be not so temporary,” said a Q2 Conviva report released last week. A tipping point spurred by the pandemic “shows no signs of reversal,” with Q2 streaming rising 13% over the “pandemic heights” of Q2 2020, it said.

Streaming service Locast went dark Thursday following U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York finding it violated the copyright of local stations whose content it carried without consent. Locast ally Mitch Stoltz, Electronic Freedom Forum (EFF) senior staff attorney, told us an appeal is likely. See our bulletin on the latest move here and our report on the court ruling against the nonprofit service here.

Two members of an open radio access network alliance have halted activities over concerns about possible ramifications of the U.S. decision to place three Chinese alliance members on the "entity list" of enterprises deemed security risks. Ericsson and Nokia responded that they remain committed to the project. Resolving the issue could require the O-RAN Alliance to throw out its Chinese members or have the U.S grant an exception, we were told last week.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan stood somewhat apart from his peers in the semiconductor industry when he expressed guarded optimism on a call Thursday for fiscal Q3 ended Aug. 1 that his company’s chip supply will be sufficient to meet demand into 2022. Broadcom has “a pretty good supply availability lineup for 2022, and we feel pretty OK about that,” said Tan. “I won't say great, but in this environment, all things considered, we're feeling quite good.”