The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles directed ICANN not to issue the .africa generic top-level domain (gTLD), granting a temporary restraining order sought by the DotConnectAfrica (DCA) Trust that halts delegation of the gTLD until after a ruling is issued in DCA’s lawsuit over its claim to the gTLD. ICANN had chosen to delegate the gTLD to ZA Central Registry over DCA and issued an emergency resolution Thursday “to prepare to move forward” with delegation of the gTLD. DCA disputed ICANN’s delegation decision and won a binding independent review process ruling at the International Centre for Dispute Resolution in 2015 that found ICANN violated its bylaws after DCA’s earlier 2013 challenge to the .africa delegation decision. U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner in Los Angeles ruled Friday there are “serious questions going to the merits” of DCA’s case. The registry “has demonstrated that once the [generic] TLD is issued, it will be unable to obtain those rights elsewhere. Moreover, the injury it will suffer cannot be compensated through monetary damages,” Klausner said in his order. ICANN claimed “the African governments and the ICANN community will suffer prejudice if the delegation of the gTLD is delayed,” Klausner said. The restraining order “will allow the Court time to consider arguments” from DCA, the registry said in a news release. ICANN said it plans to file a brief on the case March 14 and will participate in oral argument April 4, “after which the Court will make a decision about whether or not ICANN can proceed to delegation, even though the lawsuit is still proceeding.”

“Completeness of protection” is the top concern among large- and medium-sized businesses that have mobile device and IoT security systems in place, an IHS survey found. The legal battle between Apple and the FBI over iPhone encryption “has put extreme focus on the topic of mobile device security,” IHS said in a Monday report. “Like it or not, a new wave of mobile devices is being connected to corporate networks, changing the way people work and blurring the lines between personal and corporate assets -- and making nearly every enterprise in North America a target for mobile security solutions,” it said. “Buyers are making important budget and technology decisions now, and security vendors wishing to tap into the mobile and IoT device security opportunity need to offer on-device, on-network and even cloud-based solutions.” The research firm canvassed 157 businesses in the U.S. and Canada and found that many IT departments “don’t know how many or which mobile devices are on their networks already,” it said. “Even with security solutions in place, devices are lost, stolen, infected and compromised, so solutions need to address more than threat prevention.” Most IT departments also lack “comprehensive security for mobile devices, and the pressure of also rolling out solutions for IoT devices can be overwhelming,” it said.

Publishers concerned about the growing use of advertising blockers are getting some help from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. IAB released a tactical guide to help coax consumers to stop using such applications and a tool that can detect website visitors using ad blockers. "The release of this primer in conjunction with the open-source ad blocking detection script will open the door for transparency and meaningful dialogue with visitors using ad blockers,” said Scott Cunningham, IAB Tech senior vice president-general manager, in a news release Monday. He said the offerings would help both small and big publishers find a way to "cut through the blockade." IAB, whose members include News Corp., Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, The New York Times and Time, said the primer provides a step-by-step process for publishers to detect and explain to consumers the value of advertising and then ask them to remove such blockers, among other options. As of August, ad blocking reached about 198 million active users globally, a 41 percent increase over the prior 12 months and cost publishers about $22 billion, IAB statistics show. In the U.S., there were about 45 million active users as of June, the industry group said. Consumers use ad blockers to protect against viruses, improve computer performance and because they dislike ads, said IAB.

The Supreme Court denied Apple’s petition for a writ of certiorari seeking a review of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling the company violated antitrust laws in its e-book pricing case. As is customary, the Supreme Court provided no reasoning in its Monday order denying cert. Apple’s cert petition had faced long odds of getting a Supreme Court review given the court’s history of taking few antitrust cases each year and the lack of a clear split among federal circuit courts on the issues in the case (see 1510300062). The Supreme Court’s denial of Apple’s cert petition means the company will now have to pay a $450 million settlement it agreed to pay to consumers and state attorneys general that had been contingent on the 2nd Circuit’s 2015 ruling (see 1506300067), DOJ said. “Apple’s liability for knowingly conspiring with book publishers to raise the prices of e-books is settled once and for all,” said DOJ Assistant Attorney General-Antitrust Division Bill Baer in a news release. Apple didn’t comment. Amazon said it’s “ready to distribute the court-mandated settlement funds to Kindle customers as soon as we’re instructed to move forward.” The Supreme Court needed to decide “whether Apple should even be allowed to argue that its arrangement could benefit consumers,” said TechFreedom President Berin Szoka in a blog post. “Apple made a strong case that its deal with publishers was critical to allowing it [to] compete with Amazon. The Supreme Court might or might not have found those arguments convincing, but it should have at least weighed them under antitrust’s flexible rule of reason. By letting the rigid per se deal stand as the controlling legal standard, the Court has ensured that antitrust law in general will put obsolete legal precedents from the pre-digital era above consumer welfare.”

The 24 departments and agencies participating in the Office of Management and Budget's federal data center consolidation initiative "made progress" on data closure efforts but "fell short" of OMB's goal for agencies to close 40 percent of all noncore data centers by FY 2015, GAO said in its yearly review of the initiative. As of November, "agencies identified a total of 10,584 data centers, of which they reported closing 3,125," said GAO. The departments of Agriculture, Defense, Interior and Treasury had 84 percent of total data center closures. Agencies also made "limited progress" against OMB's FY 2015 core data center optimization performance metrics, and two failed to report any optimization information to OMB. GAO recommended to "better ensure that federal data center consolidation and optimization efforts improve governmental efficiency and achieve cost savings," the heads of the departments of Interior, State, Transportation and Treasury, plus the EPA, NASA, Small Business Administration, National Science Foundation, OMB and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, "take action to address challenges in establishing, and to complete, planned data center cost savings and avoidance targets for fiscal years 2016 through 2018."

Business professionals in many industries see IoT making a big shift toward “mainstream adoption” in 2016, Gartner said Thursday in a survey report. The research firm canvassed 465 firms in 18 business sectors globally in November and found 29 percent using IoT products or services, it said. An additional 14 percent are planning to implement IoT in the coming 12 months, with 21 percent more planning to implement IoT after 2016, it said. “The number of organizations adopting IoT will grow 50 percent in 2016, reaching 43 percent of organizations overall.” In the “aggregate,” 64 percent “plan to eventually implement IoT,” it said. “It is also important to note that another 38 percent have no plans to implement IoT, including 9 percent that see no relevance whatsoever in the technologies.” IoT adoption remains low because “many organizations have yet to establish a clear picture of what benefits the IoT can deliver, or have not yet invested the time to develop ideas for how to apply IoT to their business,” Gartner said. "However, we are poised for a marked shift in focus toward customer-facing benefits for planned IoT implementations, positioning IoT as a key competitive marketplace weapon going forward."

ICANN said its initial release of label generation rules for the root zone (LGR-1) is “designed to be the first installment of a conservative set of rules to determine the validity and variants of labels for the [Domain Name System] Root Zone.” LGR-1 contains code prints, variants and rules for using Arabic script in domain names. As ICANN approves additional LGR proposals for other language scripts, it will release “new versions of the integrated LGR,” the nonprofit said in a Wednesday news release. “Once finalized, each version can be applied mechanically to determine the validity of an applied-for top-level domain label and the maximal set of its allocatable variant labels for the scripts supported. Further mechanisms are being developed to determine which of these allocatable variant labels will actually be allocated to those who have applied for top-level domains.” ICANN Internationalized Domain Names Program Senior Manager Sarmad Hussain said the release of LGR-1 Wednesday is “a significant step forward in developing a multilingual Internet. These rules provide an open and transparent method for determining the validity and variants of top-level domain (TLD) names, or labels, in the world's various scripts and writing systems.” Development of LGR-1 “benefits current and future Internet users who use the Arabic script by making it easier to navigate the web, and helps address confusion and security issues in using the domain name system -- specifically top-level domains,” Hussain said in a blog post.

The federal government will let neither China nor any other government take charge of the domain name process, said Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker Thursday, restating a long-held U.S. position that a multistakeholder apparatus should govern the process. She responded to questions from Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., during a FY 2017 budget hearing before Senate Appropriations's Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee. With ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé leaving to become co-chairman of a high-level advisory committee to the Chinese government-led World Internet Conference (see 1602240035), Lankford asked Pritzker what China's role could be. "What he’s choosing to do afterwards is his business," she replied. "Our concern is to make sure that, whether it’s China or any other government, because there are other governments that would like to take over the domain name process and we’re not going to allow that. That is not the objective here. The objective is to keep it in the multistakeholder domain." Lankford, echoing concerns of other lawmakers about China's role, said "it's very, very important" to keep the Internet "open, free and not limited. But when you’re dealing with China in the way this has been dealt with in so many places, it raises red flags to me on that.”

Freight railroads are making increasing use of broadband and are embracing changing technology, said Michael Rush, senior vice president of the Association of American Railroads, in an opinion piece in Re/Code building on the association’s recent “State of the Industry” report (see 1601270047). “Consumers may not associate freight railroads -- responsible for overseeing a vast infrastructure with more than 100,000 privately owned bridges and 1.5 million rail cars in the U.S. -- with high-tech and the startups driving consumer behavior today,” Rush wrote. “But for every disruptive technology like ride sharing or autonomous cars, there is a reliable freight railroad incorporating new technologies that ensure the efficiency and safety of the nation’s essential rail network.”

Plaintiffs in 17 of 20 class-action complaints against the Inscape viewer-tracking feature on Vizio smart TVs (see 1512060005) agree with Vizio that the complaints should be transferred to the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California, and "centralized" there into one case, lawyers for the plaintiffs and Vizio told the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in a joint filing. The panel scheduled oral argument for March 31 in Santa Barbara, California, on the motion to consolidate, the panel order said. All the complaints allege Inscape violates the federal Video Protection Privacy Act and other federal and state statutes. Vizio hadn’t filed a legal defense to any of the complaints and agreed to submit one of the cases to a private mediator (see 1512060005). Plaintiffs in two of the remaining cases want the complaints transferred to and consolidated in federal courts in Arkansas or Indiana, court papers show. “Centralization” of the cases “is appropriate and prudent,” and Santa Ana is “the most logical forum choice,” because that court has a history of “expeditiously and efficiently” resolving civil complaints, the 17 plaintiffs and Vizio also told the panel Thursday in written arguments. Santa Ana also makes sense because Vizio and most of the plaintiffs are based in Southern California, they said. Consolidating the various complaints into one case in a single locale would “promote judicial economy and avoid inconsistent rulings,” the arguments said.