CTA CEO Gary Shapiro used his annual state of the industry address Tuesday to warn against the threat from tariffs expected under the administration of President-elect Donald Trump. Meanwhile, other speakers highlighted challenges consumers and industry will face as AI is added to smartphones and becomes a part of daily life.
CTA urged President-elect Donald Trump's administration to move with care on proposals for imposing higher tariffs on imports, warning they could result in sharp declines in the purchases of smartphones and other devices. With CES beginning in Las Vegas, CTA also projected retail revenue in the consumer tech industry of $537 billion this year, up 3.2% over 2024.
President-elect Donald Trump and Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr delivered additional bad news to broadcasters Tuesday about how the incoming administration may interact with them. Carr during an interview with Fox News that a news distortion complaint against CBS over its editing of an interview with Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris (see 2410170051) could affect the Skydance/Paramount Global deal. Carr said he planned to “reinvigorate” the legacy media by emphasizing broadcaster public interest obligations, and referred to the Skydance transaction as a possible example. “I'm pretty confident that news distortion complaint over the CBS 60 Minutes transcript is something that's likely to rise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction,” Carr said (see 2411010044). Paramount didn’t comment. Carr listed conferring with Trump and the space economy as priorities for his upcoming chairmanship. “The first thing is to get together with the president's team and make sure that I 100% understand his agenda,” Carr said: “After all, it is going to be his administration, and his agenda we’ll be pushing.” He also listed tech censorship, rural broadband and accelerating permitting for the satellite industry as priorities. Carr repeated plans for ending the FCC’s promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion policies (see 2411180059). “The idea that the [FCC] listed its second-highest strategic priority as promoting DEI, there's no place for that,” Carr said. “And when the transition is complete, when we come in, the FCC is going to end its promotion of DEI.” Trump said he would nominate Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, who heads the president-elect’s transition team, to be commerce secretary. Lutnick, just days before the Nov. 5 election, said the U.S. should auction broadcast spectrum to only outlets that “agree to be nonpartisan” (see 2410280037). Lutnick’s comments came amid Trump’s fights with several major broadcasters over election coverage. Lutnick “will lead our Tariff and Trade agenda, with additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative,” Trump said: Lutnick as transition chief “has created the most sophisticated process and system to assist us in creating the greatest Administration America has ever seen.” USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter said in a statement the group could work with Lutnick and the Commerce Department “to advance America’s global connectivity leadership by deploying more broadband, collaborating to prevent cyber threats, and spurring innovation throughout the economy.”
The union representing FCC employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, said it's ready to work with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration but warned that it would oppose efforts against federal workers. The Trump White House is expected to implement plans laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Trump campaign’s Agenda 47, reducing the federal workforce and reclassifying many career civil servants, making it easier to fire and replace them with political appointees, academics and analysts told us. The NTEU “will make every effort to work in good faith” with the Trump administration, said NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald in a release. “However, we are fully prepared to work with our allies in Congress and use all the tools we have to fight any and all actions taken by his administration that would harm frontline federal workers, our ability to represent them or their ability to serve the American people.”