CTA Chief Slams FTC Merger Policy, in CES Address
The Consumer Technology Association's president sharply criticized FTC merger policy during a Thursday keynote at CES. CTA also released a scorecard on the most innovative countries in the world. In one of the most prominent presentations at CES, John Deere executives described how the autonomous tractor will help feed the world as population continues to expand. The company introduced the fully autonomous tractor at CES a year ago.
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“Sadly” the FTC “has shifted away from decades of bipartisan support for a standard that was simply ‘what is the best for the consumer’ when we’re evaluating antitrust issues like acquisitions,” CTA President Gary Shapiro said: “It’s shifted to a new standard, ‘what’s best to protect the existing competitors,’ which is the actual antithesis of innovation, the antithesis of a free market system and the antithesis of getting to a more innovative economy.”
Shapiro said he has heard from large and small companies that current FTC policy will hurt U.S. competitiveness. Most small companies grow through acquisition, he said.
“The work” of the FTC “is rooted in congressional authority dating back over a century and supported by substantial judicial precedent,” an FTC spokesperson emailed in response to Shapiro. FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter is scheduled to speak at CES Saturday.
CTA welcomes laws and regulation, Shapiro said. “We need regulation which sets the ground rules, so you don’t have to go to the government to ask for permission before you create something,” he said. “We need rules that allow competitive markets but don’t protect existing competitors,” he said.
“Our role as a trade association … is to make sure the government policies promote, rather than hinder, innovation and growth,” Shapiro said. “There’s no shortage of ideas, and they don’t come from just one place in the world; they’re global,” he said: “What we need for that is low barriers to entry for anyone. Certainly big companies want the small companies there. Small companies want to get in.”
The U.S. ranked No. 4 in composite score on the CTA innovation scorecard released Thursday, behind only Estonia, Switzerland and Finland. But CTA gave the U.S. only a B in the category of freedom, putting it in the middle of the pack overall. “Freedom evaluates the degree to which a country grants its citizens certain civil and political liberties,” CTA said: “The grades are derived by equally weighting select components of CATO Institute’s Human Freedom Index.” Among countries ranked as “innovation champions,” only Israel and Singapore got lower freedom grades than the U.S.
The U.S. got a B+ for broadband, based on the number of mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 POPs. The U.S. scored a B+ for tax friendliness and A- for R&D investment and entrepreneurial activity.
Precision Agriculture
Deere CEO John May said when he started at the company 25 years ago, the focus was on building the biggest, most powerful equipment possible. “At that time, the bigger the equipment was, the more efficient it was in a field, building a highway or at a construction site,” he said: “This is fundamentally changing. Today, farming construction and road building is less about the size of the machines and more about technology, intelligence and sustainability.”
Over the next 25 years, the global population is expected to grow from 8 billion to 10 billion, while the amount of U.S. farmland continues to decline, May said. “More people, less land -- the math doesn’t work,” he said. “Technology allows farmers to do more with fewer resources,” he said. All the technology Deere is demonstrating at CES is “real,” he said: “It’s either being used by customers now or it will be used soon, at scale.”
In the past decade, the data farmers collect moved to the cloud, said Deanna Kovar, Deere vice president-production. “We are now in a decade of advanced AI and computer vision that integrates precision tech and cloud-based data with robotics” and machine learning, she said. Farmers have proven to be some of the earliest adopters of technology, she said.
“Technology in agriculture is not a convenience, it’s a necessity,” Kovar said. Planting seeds is one of the most important parts of farming and has been transformed by technology, she said. “While planting, sensors and advanced robots place each seed in the ground at a scale and precision beyond human capacity,” she said: “A farmer can plant thousands of seeds per second, at a precise depth and distance from one another for optimal growth.”
AI is “truly the most important megatrend for the future of tech,” said Lisa Su, CEO of leading chipmaker AMD, in another CES keynote.
Su introduced a new AMD chip, the Ryzen 7040, with a dedicated on-chip AI engine. “We’re already using AI every day -- think about Siri or Alexa on your smartphone or your smart device, or when you’re doing shopping, identifying your shopping preferences online, or creating individualized medical treatments, or even predicting weather patterns,” she said.
Su said the COVID-19 pandemic made clear the importance of the semiconductor industry. “There’s been this incredible surge in demand that’s stressed all aspects of our supply chain,” she said: “The pandemic made it clear that semiconductors are absolutely essential to everything that we do. Virtually every product, every service, every experience in our lives is powered by semiconductors.”