The FTC has received more than 270,000 COVID-19-related complaints this year with a total fraud loss of more than $200 million, said Consumer and Business Education Division Senior Project Manager Colleen Tressler during a joint webinar Wednesday with the FCC. Top such complaints involve online shopping for in-demand products and text message and phone scams, said Tressler. FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau Chief Patrick Webre cited promising vaccine reports as he expressed optimism “that life may be able to return to a sense of normalcy in the not-too-distant future.” Scams continue, he said, with perpetrators trying to steal identities and capitalize on uncertainty, at-risk groups and stimulus programs. Robocalls remain a top complaint to the FCC, said Consumer Affairs and Outreach Division Associate Chief Keyla Hernandez-Ulloa. Elijah Hebert, a U.S. Postal Inspection Service inspector, suggested consumers buy products only from “known, reliable retailers and e-commerce companies.”

The FCC Wireline Bureau extended for a third time a waiver of access stimulation rules for CLEC Inteliquent, said an order Wednesday. An earlier order extended the waiver to Dec. 1 (see 2009170055). The new extension runs through March 1. COVID-19 caused a continuing increase in traffic for conference-calling services Zoom and Cisco WebEx, which are Inteliquent customers, the order said.

The pandemic has hit the commercial space industry and the space economy but not as hard as for some other industries or as badly as it could have been, experts said Wednesday at an International Institute of Space Law symposium. IISL President Kai-Uwe Schrogl said the aeronautics industry suffered more. He said smaller space companies and startups might face short- and medium-term challenges getting financing, and governments need to try to bolster and maintain the commercial space industry's attractiveness to financing. He said there were estimates that the $300 billion global space economy might hit $1 trillion by 2030, but the economic downturn due to the pandemic likely pushed that a few years further into the future. Nanoracks General Counsel Jessica Noble said the company had notable numbers of delays in cubesat projects done in partnership with universities. This year has been "an economic disaster" for the European space industry, said Fritz Merkle, U.S. Space Foundation board member. He said European space operations were hit by the reduced working mode of space agencies and government entities important for contracting new programs. The French and European Space Agency Guiana Space Centre spaceport in French Guiana was closed for weeks, he said, noting private investment in space also is slumping, particularly for European satellite communications. He said the economic downturn will likely continue until a COVID-19 vaccine returns things to some form of normalcy. China's space efforts haven't been largely impacted, said Guoyu Wang, associate professor at Beijing Institute of Technology's Academy of Air, Space Policy and Law. He said China has had 37 launches so far this year, and the carrying capacity of its rockets has reached new levels. He said this year also saw China's first successful commercial launches, and the commercial launch industry will be "a strong supplement" to its national launch capabilities. He said China's Beidou-3 global navigation satellite system is fully operational and providing global service; by October, more than 700 million products with Beidou-compatible chipsets were in China, including smartphones, and Beidou-compatible products had been exported to 120 nations.

Lockdown orders “collapsed” worldwide personal transit demand, “with all mobility modes at the consumer’s disposal contracting significantly in the first half of 2020,” reported ABI Research Tuesday. After 14% growth in 2019, the market “faced its first significant disruption,” it said. “Strict controls on personal mobility, combined with a growing concern over shared spaces,” sent the market down 59%, said ABI: The “pivot” toward food-delivery services “helped ride-hailing platforms maintain driver engagement,” but long-term challenges will remain over concerns with “integrity of shared public spaces.”

Congress should provide relief for the live entertainment industry in its next aid package, Patriot Management President Ron Laffitte told the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee during a hearing Tuesday. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and subcommittee ranking member Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., described how COVID-19 is affecting the live entertainment industry, citing an inability to work and venues struggling to stay in business. The concern is frontline workers in the industry, said Wicker. Relief should focus on employees and contractors, said Laffitte, with grants and loans for payroll. Congress should extend retention tax credits, he said, so workers keep their jobs and employee-sponsored healthcare.

CES 2022 will have a digital component and “we also plan to be physical in Las Vegas because of that five-sense experience of being with people,” CTA Gary Shapiro told a CES 2021 virtual briefing Tuesday. “We love technology and what it’s doing” to enable society to communicate during the pandemic, he said. “But it’s really not the same as being there face to face.” CTA prerecorded the briefing remarks “for practical reasons,” said Jean Foster, senior vice president-marketing and communications, without explaining why. She, Shapiro and Executive Vice President-CES Karen Chupka appeared for a live Q&A. Bob Bejan, Microsoft corporate vice president-global events, production studios and marketing community, appeared only on video to describe the Microsoft cloud technology platform on which CES 2021 will run. Its cost in dollars runs in the seven figures, Shapiro said. Show organizers will deploy “the safest methods possible” to return to a physical CES in January 2022, said Shapiro. He hopes the COVID-19 vaccine will “be used by a great portion of the population,” he said. “We’ll be looking at all our sanitary methods and doing the best practices, but already, a whole bunch -- hundreds of exhibitors -- have signed up for CES 2022 in Las Vegas. The city of Las Vegas is waiting and ready for us.”

Forty-seven percent of U.S. adults used telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic, said HealthInsurance.com Monday. That's up from 9% pre-pandemic. Rasmussen canvassed 1,000 consumers online Dec. 4-8 for the healthcare shopping site.

LG will use the virtual CES 2021 to unveil an autonomous robot that uses ultraviolet light to disinfect high-touch, high-traffic areas, said the company Monday.

COVID-19 “reversed a decade” of video consumption trends, the Raymond James media usage survey for December found. Consumers value cable and satellite TV “a little more during a pandemic,” it found. Though “cable-first” homes in December declined to 31% of respondents from 32% in May, “this is still significantly elevated from the 28% of respondents who reported as such pre-COVID” in November 2019, it said. “As consumers were forced to shut in and the TV screen became the primary entertainment vehicle, the value of basic pay-TV packages was reaffirmed.” Cord shaving remains the “norm” over cord cutting, as 21% “expressed intent to trade down" from their current video package, compared with 24% in May and 22% in November 2019. The percentage of respondents intending to cord cut stayed flat at 6%. “In light of the current stay-at-home, recessionary environment, it makes perfect sense why a greater percentage of respondents would look to keep linear TV while simply reducing their monthly spend.” Raymond James projects that the “ultimate transition” to over-the-top streaming and away from linear TV “is likely to be even more protracted as a result of COVID-19.”

Only 27% of the largest U.S. employers plan to return workers to physical offices “near term,” with most pushing back the reopening to later in 2021, KPMG found. It canvassed senior executives at 100 companies in September that collectively employ 5 million workers, finding 82% of companies are letting employees decide when they feel comfortable returning to the office. Only 18% are mandating that employees return to the office by a certain date. "Organizations are working on new measures to avoid exposing employees to undue health risks through widespread return-to-office initiatives ahead of available vaccines," said KPMG. Social distancing in the physical office is the most common practice being deployed at 52%, followed by contact tracing (48%) and daily symptom checks (44%).