Antitrust authorities cleared the way for investment firm Mithril to buy data analytics software company Palantir Technologies. An FTC early termination notice dated Dec. 23 and released Wednesday ended the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period.

The Wireless ISP Association said Tuesday it acquired the Multifamily Broadband Council (MBC), which focuses on multifamily dwelling units. WISPA and MBC partnered on WISPA’s annual show in Las Vegas this year. Some “30% of Americans live in MDUs, and millions more work in office buildings,” said a WISPA news release. “Although MDUs represent dense concentrations of potential customers for broadband providers, they also present unique practical and policy challenges to deployment. Competition for this market is often frustrated by telecommunications incumbents, whose practices can make competition more challenging in the MDU space.” MBC will dissolve at the end of this year and be folded into WISPA.

A federal court entered a permanent injunction blocking a tech support fraud scheme led by an individual and four companies, DOJ announced Tuesday. Michael Cotter of Glendale, California; Singapore-registered Global Digital Concierge; Nevada-registered Sensei Ventures and NE Labs; and New York-registered KeviSoft are barred from “selling technical-support services or software via telemarketing or websites,” DOJ said. A complaint filed in October alleged Cotter led the scheme from 2011 to 2020, contacting “U.S. consumers via internet pop-up messages that falsely appeared to be security alerts from Microsoft or another well-known company” and fooling them into paying for unnecessary services.

Households with internet service at home rose to 86% in 2020, with broadband accounting for 97% of those, Leichtman Research Group reported Monday. The percentage of households getting internet service at home and on a mobile phone jumped from 64% in 2015 to 78% in 2020. The percentage of households with internet service at home "is now higher than in any previous year,” said Leichtman President Bruce Leichtman. The average adult also reported spending 5.3 hours per day online, more than double the amount in 2010.

Stay-at-home mandates spurred the average HomePass Wi-Fi subscriber home to surpass 1.87 TB in 2020 data use, “the equivalent of downloading Home Alone 467 times,” emailed smart home company Plume Wednesday. May “was the busiest month on average for HomePass members,” at 261 GB per home, it said, as that month “saw the beginning of people adjusting to the stay-at-home order.” Plume “blocked 676 security threats for the average HomePass household this year,” it said. “The number of threats blocked in each home varies based on factors such as number and types of devices, amount of online activity, and global cyberthreat trends.” The average speed in a HomePass home was 287.77 Mbps for the year, it said.

BSA|The Software Alliance filed a brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit supporting Microsoft’s appeal of a nondisclosure order from the Eastern District of New York barring it from notifying anyone that it received a warrant for a business customer’s data. “Industry depends on the trust that customers place in cloud service providers to protect their data,” BSA said (in Pacer) in the brief, posted Tuesday in docket 20-3945. “To maintain that trust, when the Government demands a customer’s data, a cloud service provider must be allowed to notify the customer in all but the most unusual circumstances,’ BSA said. “Upholding nondisclosure orders that fail to meet First Amendment requirements, like the one at issue here, threatens to undermine the customer trust that is essential to the cloud services industry.” A group of former prosecutors from New York also supported (in Pacer) Microsoft. “New technologies should not be exempt from traditional constitutional safeguards,” they said: “The issuance of a § 2705(b) secrecy order must be justified by a specific and meaningful showing and must be narrowly tailored to promote a compelling government interest and be the least restrictive means of achieving that interest.”

Under BlackBerry’s agreement with Amazon Web Services to develop and market BlackBerry’s cloud-based intelligent vehicle data system, code-named Ivy, to automotive OEMs, BlackBerry “will own all the commercial relationships with customers” and will share revenue with AWS, said BlackBerry CEO John Chen on a fiscal Q3 investor call Thursday. AWS and BlackBerry announced the agreement Dec. 1. Modern vehicles generate huge amounts of data, but the auto industry “is not prepared to capture and create value from the analytics” because the data are difficult to collect and monetize “without very costly integrations,” said Chen. Ivy’s task “is to make it easy to gather, securely transport and analyze these data in a standard and a cost-efficient way across multiple brands and models on a common platform,” he said. The multiyear pact with AWS is an “exclusive co-development and co-marketing agreement,” he said. “This type of agreement is rare. BlackBerry and AWS engineers have been working very closely to jointly build the platform.” The effort will yield “an ecosystem of apps and services developed on the BlackBerry Ivy platform over time,” he said. The platform’s “recurring revenue model” will monetize data analytics apps and services on per-use and subscription bases, he said. “An important difference between BlackBerry Ivy and competitors in this space is that we allow the OEM to own the data and with that the relationship with their customers. We’re already in discussion with some automakers who were granted early access and we have received positive initial feedback.” The target is to commercialize the first Ivy apps and services in time for automakers’ 2023 model year, he said. “While it is too early for us to provide a revenue outlook, we are confident that BlackBerry Ivy addresses a very large market opportunity.”

The Department of Transportation has identified most of the oversight skills the agency’s workforce needs to regulate self-driving cars and other automated technologies, but hasn’t “fully assessed whether its workforce has these skills,” reported GAO Friday. “DOT did not survey staff or assess skill gaps in data analysis or cybersecurity positions important to automated technology oversight.” The agency therefore lacks “critical information needed to identify skill gaps and ensure key relevant staff are equipped to oversee the safety of these technologies now and in the future,” said the auditor. DOT agrees with GAO recommendations that it should “regularly measure progress toward closing skill gaps,” but thinks its current program of doing skills assessments every three years is “sufficient,” said the agency. GAO recommended annual assessments. DOT promised a “detailed response” to GAO's recommendations within 180 days.

U.S. e-commerce sales rose 33% year over year in the first nine months of 2020, while traditional retail sales grew 1%, said Brie Carere, FedEx chief marketing and communications officer. E-commerce package shipping volume is expected to more than triple to 111 million packages daily by 2026 from 2019, she told a quarterly call Thursday.

Total online consumer spending topped $22 billion over the big three holiday season shopping days, reported Comscore Friday. Cyber Monday sales rose 24% to $9.81 billion, vs. a 31% increase from 2018 to 2019. Black Friday online sales grew 26% to $7.34 billion, and Thanksgiving sales jumped 26% to $4.94 billion. Mobile’s share of digital spending on Thanksgiving reached 45%, from 40% a year ago; mobile spending on Black Friday was 42% vs. 37%.