New Mexico urged the FCC to develop interoperability standards for the national public safety network. “FirstNet/AT&T coverage is insufficient in many parts of this rural State,” so "public safety personnel in different geographic regions within New Mexico may well elect to operate on other public safety networks,” New Mexico Chief Information Officer Vincent Martinez wrote the commission, posted Friday in docket 19-254. “The level of priority and preemption between users on FirstNet/AT&T and other networks must be standardized to avoid a situation in which a high priority public safety user on one network is treated as a commercial user on another network.”

The government should prioritize computing hardware, software infrastructure and developing new “real-world” applications, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said Thursday in an update to the national strategic computing initiative. The document, an update to the 2016 Strategic Computing Plan, emphasizes a computing hardware focus on the “10-year horizon and beyond.” Software infrastructure should enable “effective and sustainable use of new computing.” Agencies should also promote overall infrastructure related to “data usage and management to cybersecurity, foundries, and prototypes.” OSTP recommended integration with “emerging data-driven applications.”

The Internet Society sold the Public Interest Registry to investment firm Ethos Capital, the organizations said Wednesday. ISOC set up PIR to run the .org top-level domain, and the transaction will benefit them both by ensuring PIR's long-term financial security and providing more diversified funding "to support the Internet Society's vision that the Internet is for everyone." Several initiatives will promote the .org community, including a stewardship council to uphold PIR's core values and expansion of a program that awards .org prizes for touting the success and positive impact of nonprofit organizations, they said.

U.S. government searches of international travelers’ phones and laptops without warrant or probable cause violate the Fourth Amendment, U.S. District Court in Boston ruled Tuesday. Alasaad v. McAleenan involved controversial airport searches by Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU of Massachusetts filed the lawsuit. “This is a great day for travelers who now can cross the international border without fear that the government will, in the absence of any suspicion, ransack the extraordinarily sensitive information we all carry in our electronic devices," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. The Department of Homeland Security didn't comment.

Disney is adding “distribution partnerships” with Amazon Fire, LG and Samsung for the Disney Plus streaming service launching Tuesday in the U.S., said CEO Bob Iger on fiscal Q4 call Thursday. It already had partnerships with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Roku and Sony. Disney Plus also will launch March 31 in “markets across Western Europe,” said Iger. The company won’t disclose “specifics” on Disney Plus preorders, he said. Consumers are greeting with “great enthusiasm" the $6.99 monthly price but also the $169.99 three-year subscription offer, “which is a big deal for us in terms of lowering churn,” he said. “We're still relatively small in terms of the scope of things,” but “we certainly feel good about the product that's going into the marketplace,” he said. “We'll know a lot more in just a few days.”

The U.S. and the EU need to cooperate and defend innovation against technological threats from adversaries like China, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios said Thursday in Portugal. He accused China of pushing an authoritarian state that favors “censorship over free expression and citizen control over empowerment.” China also uses technology to surveil and control its citizens and steals intellectual property from the U.S., he said, noting the importance of 5G and artificial intelligence. “If we don’t act now, Chinese influence and control of technology will not only undermine the freedoms of their own citizens, but all citizens of the world,” he said. The Chinese embassy in D.C. didn't comment.

San Francisco Superior Court should order Facebook comply with an investigatory subpoena about alleged data privacy violations, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) said Wednesday. Allegations involve the company’s Cambridge Analytica privacy breach. The subpoena was issued in June, and Facebook provided “inadequate responses” and failed to “provide, or even search for, responsive documents among the communications of the company’s senior executives,” Becerra said. Responding to a second subpoena, the platform “provided no answers to 19 out of 27 written interrogatories, provided a partial response to six, and produced no documents in response to six document requests,” the AG said. The company has “cooperated extensively" with California’s investigation, said Vice President-State and Local Policy Will Castleberry in a statement. “We have provided thousands of pages of written responses and hundreds of thousands of documents.”

ICANN must ensure that its temporary Whois rules effectively allow reasonable access to nonpublic personal registration data while it tries to comply with the EU general data protection regulation (GDPR), speakers said Tuesday at ICANN's Saturday-Thursday meeting in Montreal. The problem is that, while the first phase of the expedited policy development process (EPDP) developed the temporary specification under which ICANN now operates, there's still no conclusion to the phase 2 work, which involves creating a new model to allow legitimate parties to access nonpublic registrants' data, said Laureen Kapin, FTC counsel-international consumer protection, at a Governmental Advisory Committee meeting. On Monday, EPDP group chair Janis Karklins said his top priority is to find a standardized system of access and disclosure (SSAD) for such data. A draft paper on a hypothetical SSAD model was sent to the European Data Protection Board Oct. 25, said ICANN Government and International Governmental Organizations Engagement Senior Director Elena Plexida. The model proposes a centralized access system to decide whether personal data should be disclosed, but it's not clear whether this idea will fly under the GDPR. The EPDP group is moving toward drafting an initial report that, in the "optimistic scenario," could be published in early December and finalized in May, Karklins said. If that timeline is delayed, the final report might not emerge until June, he said. The question is how to make the policy reality, Kapin said: There's "real concern" among governments that despite the existence of the temporary policy, law enforcement agencies, intellectual property owners, cybersecurity researchers and other stakeholders are having trouble accessing Whois data. Many who no longer see the data in Whois either don't know they can ask for it or are unsure how to do so, she said. Governments should recommend that ICANN do a better job of ensuring that its existing policy is working properly, she said. Another policy in the works is new procedures for subsequent new generic top-level domains. ICANN is reviewing the 2012 round of gTLDs to determine if changes to the procedures are needed, said Jeff Neuman, co-chair of the Generic Names Supporting Organization policy development working group. The panel is preparing draft recommendations for a final report expected to go to the GNSO Council by the end of Q1 2020 and to the board by late Q2, he said. Directors are likely to commission another applicants' guidebook for the next round, with new gTLDs possible by late 2021 or early 2022.

The Digital Justice Foundation requests a panel rehearing and rehearing en banc of net neutrality case Mozilla v FCC, case 18-1051, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, its petition (on Pacer) emailed Friday. It said the D.C. Circuit's panel decision "plainly misstated DJF's position" on why the FCC 2018 net neutrality order transparency rule failed to meet the circuit's "arbitrary and capricious" standards. DJF said the 2018 order excluded audiences, including engineers and consumer watchdogs, on scope of transparency rules. It identified "major discrepancies" between the transparency rule and the 2010 one it purported to be returning to "with minor modifications." In an earlier brief, DJF asked the court to vacate the 2018 order's transparency rule and declare the previous 2105 transparency rule remains.

Apple's CEO isn't scared about the next tranche of tariffs that takes effect Dec. 15 on smartphones and other devices. Tim Cook's view is “very positive in terms of how things are going," he said on a call Wednesday on Q4 ended Sept. 28. The tone of trade talks “has changed significantly, and I have long thought that it was in both countries’ best interests to get to an agreement that maybe initially doesn't solve everything but solves some things that each party may want,” he said of the U.S. and China. “I'm hopeful that that's where we're headed.” Cook highlighted the “recurring payment” model a growing number of iPhone users have adopted. He said the company wants to make that process easier, responding to a question on plans for bundling hardware and services, which the company is doing for the first time beginning Friday (see 1910310050). That Apple TV Plus service bundle is “a great way to get more people to see the content,” Cook said. Critics have noted limited content available. Though bundling won’t be a “pattern,” Cook said, “I wouldn't want to rule out for the future that we might not see another opportunity at some point.” The CEO was sanguine about iPhone’s 9 percent decline (see 1910310032), saying it's a “significant improvement” over the 15 percent decline in the year-ago quarter.