ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé urged the U.N. Tuesday to continue bringing together all Internet governance stakeholders to solve issues as part of a “polycentric approach” to Internet governance. “The Internet is the great equalizer in [a] world where inequality is still a key challenge,” he said. Chehadé was among the Internet industry executives addressing the U.N. as it began its two-day high-level meeting on its 10-year review of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+10). A draft WSIS+10 outcome document circulated before the U.N.’s high-level meeting endorses the central tenets of multistakeholder Internet governance and recommits to WSIS' Tunis Agreement. The draft document would also extend the Internet Governance Forum's mandate for another 10 years, as expected (see 1511200063).

DearMob released an upgrade for 5KPlayer for Windows version 3.2 that it said Friday is to optimize H.265/HEVC video codec playback of 4K and 8K UHD videos for “much smoother” H.265 streaming. The upgrade added a feature that allows the app to play a portion of damaged H.265 files, it said.

Basic streaming media sticks will be a popular gift item this holiday season, due to competitive pricing and expanded over-the-top services, said Barbara Kraus, Parks Associates research director, in a research note Friday. Fourteen percent of U.S. broadband households plan to buy a streaming media player by mid-2016, with 31 percent owning one by Q3, said Kraus. Next year, devices will differentiate through additional content options and new technologies such as 4K video, Kraus said. "Ultimately consumers want a simple, uninterrupted experience in accessing OTT content, so that will be the minimum expectation for any device, regardless of the cost.” Kraus said two-thirds of U.S. broadband households connect at least one device to the Internet, with Xbox the leading device used for streaming in 14 percent of U.S. broadband households. Following are PlayStation at just under 14 percent and Roku at 10 percent, it said.

New top-level domains “are not treated any differently than traditional domain names like .com or .org” within Google's search results, Google Domains Product Marketing Manager Chad Lancaster said in a blog post Thursday on “common questions” about new TLDs. “Domain names with new endings are shown in search just like any other domain name.” Lancaster suggested website owners prepare URL mapping from current URLs to their corresponding new URLs when moving to a new TLD, along with configuring for redirection of site contents to the new URLs. “It takes time to be fully processed in Google Search, but once it is, your new domain name is expected to work just like your old domain name,” Lancaster said.

Worldwide spending on IoT will grow from $698 billion in 2015 to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019, an IDC report said Thursday. The Asia/Pacific region leads in IoT spending, with 40 percent of the market, followed by North America and Western Europe, at a combined $250 billion this year, IDC said. In North America, the fastest growing IoT use case is retail marketing, it said. “In-store contextual marketing is growing rapidly as retailers try to capture continuous, real-time streams of data from mobile devices, online customer activity, in-store Wi-Fi routers/beacons, and video cameras in order to gain insight into customer behavior and desires.”

Certain legal aspects of algorithms and information collection and distribution aren't particularly well defined, and more transparency is needed to illuminate the data used by algorithms to make decisions for individuals, panelists said at a New America Foundation event Thursday. Algorithms normally put out information or conclusions that aren't "super surprising," University of Maryland College of Information Studies associate professor Jennifer Golbeck said, and shouldn't be relied on as the ultimate source for a decision. "The things we have to keep in mind with algorithms today is that they are going to tell us stuff, but we absolutely have to have intelligent humans taking that as one piece of input that they use to make decisions," Golbeck said. "[And] not just handing control over to the algorithms and [letting] them make decisions on their own because they are going to be wrong a lot of the time. They are not going to do things as well as a human can do." Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology professor of interactive computing, urged the media to delve deeper into the actual processes behind the operation of algorithms, rather than simply equating them to an all-knowing, mystical being. "The way we discuss algorithms in the media really does matter," he said. Laura Moy, New America's Open Technology Institute's senior policy counsel, said when thinking of the problematic outcomes of the innovative uses of algorithms, "a lot of times there aren't really clear legal 'don'ts,'" and pointed to consumer privacy as another issue presented by algorithms and data collection. Moy said algorithms have the potential to perpetuate human biases and could have "some sort of disparate impact" on users, also saying it's difficult to identify or correct the addition of human biases in algorithms. It would be worth thinking about building in ways we can check for bias and to identify it when using algorithms to produce a service or result, she said. "At a basic level, transparency about what information is going in and how it might be used to make decisions that could impact the individual, that level of transparency to the individual is important." Moy also said regulators are looking into correcting bias in algorithms in their design, and a few federal agencies have been thinking about it as a fairness issue and starting to address it. "From the regulators' perspective, full transparency, full insight into what all of the inputs [into algorithms] might possibly be and [in]to how it works is important," said Moy.

User numbers for infidelity app Ashley Madison are "bouncing back," and in Q3 hit where they were before the summer's high-profile data breach that resulted in millions of users being revealed (see 1507200017), said online security company AVG Technologies in a report Tuesday. "Perhaps in anticipation of a 'singleton' Christmas, dating and cheating apps, in general, saw an uptick in usage over the third quarter, with Ashley Madison competitor platforms MiuMeet and AnastasiaDate both joining the app in seeing a rise in numbers from the previous quarter," AVG said in a news release. The report highlights app usage trends, analyzing anonymous data from more than 1 million AVG Android app users.

After a torrid rate of holiday-season online and mobile shopping growth (see here, 1512030017 and 1512020033), Adobe said Monday that growth slowed on the Web to 7.7 percent. Average order values (AOV) for electronics, down year over year, reached a peak on Thanksgiving at $162, and fell since Cyber Monday, the company said. Consumers spent $149 on average for electronics so far this season, compared with $176 in 2014, it said. After a record-setting Black Friday ($2.74 billion) and Cyber Monday ($3.07 billion), Monday of this week and Dec. 14 are forecast to be the third- and fourth-highest online sales days of the holiday season, Adobe said. Online sales for Dec. 7 were forecast to have reached $1.92 billion, while online sales for Dec. 14 are expected to hit $1.95 billion, Adobe said. Mobile’s influence continues to be felt, at 27 percent of online sales revenue ($2.5 billion) during the first six days of December, Adobe said. That’s down from a record 32 percent over Thanksgiving weekend, it said. Findings are based on aggregated and anonymous data from 3.7 billion visits to 4,500 retail websites, and Adobe measures 80 percent of online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers.

Mozilla launched a free content blocker for Safari users on iOS 9, allowing users to control their flow of data "by blocking categories of trackers such as those used for ads, analytics and social media," wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief legal and business officer. The tool can also enhance mobile device performance by blocking Web fonts, she added. "Too many users have lost trust and lack meaningful controls over their digital lives. This loss of trust has impacted the ecosystem -- sometimes negatively. Content blockers offer a way to rebuild that trust by empowering users," she wrote Monday. Standards for what gets blocked by such tools aren't clear, she wrote, saying blockers don't provide ways for content providers "to improve and become unblocked. And some content blockers remove companies from a list in exchange for payment." Dixon-Thayer wrote that Mozilla has based a portion of its tool, Focus by Firefox, on a list provided by partner Disconnect under a general public license. Disconnect "bases its list on a public definition of tracking and publicly identifies any changes it makes to that list, so users and content providers can see and understand the standards it is applying," she wrote. It means content providers can improve their practices and become unblocked, "creating an important feedback loop between users and content providers," she added.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral argument Wednesday in Facebook v. Power Ventures. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed several amicus briefs supporting Power Ventures, said in a Monday news release that it will urge the 9th Circuit to dismiss Facebook's claim that Cayman Islands-based Power Ventures violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) when it created a Web-based tool permitting users to log into all of their social media accounts in one place and aggregate messages, friend lists and other data. Facebook sued Power Ventures in 2008 and claimed the company also violated the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (Can-Spam) Act, which prohibits sending unwanted emails with misleading information. In February 2012, U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Francisco granted Facebook’s motion for summary judgment (see 1202210105). In September 2013, Power Ventures was ordered to pay more than $3 million in damages to Facebook. Power Ventures CEO Steven Vachani appealed the ruling. EFF said Legal Fellow Jamie Williams will argue that the 9th Circuit "has already ruled that the CFAA must be interpreted narrowly to avoid transforming what was intended to be an anti-hacking statute into a law that could sweep up innocuous conduct. Criminalizing a routine process like switching IP addresses stifles innovation and harms consumers -- and it’s not what Congress had in mind." Facebook didn't comment Tuesday.