An auction of 700 MHz spectrum closed in France after 11 bidding rounds, bringing in a total of 2.796 billion euros ($2.97 billion), said the Autorité de Régulation des Communications Electroniques et des Postes in a news release. Six 5 MHz blocks were offered for sale. Free Mobile and Orange got two blocks each, Bouygues Telecom and SFR one block each. The French regulator is still determining where each will be located on the frequency band.

France’s 700 MHz band auction is underway, said the Autorité de Régulation des Communications Electroniques et des Postes (ARCEP) in a news release Monday. “The procedure got underway this morning as planned,” ARCEP said. “It was interrupted late morning to allow all of the participants to observe the moment of silence and commemoration held across France today.” ARCEP said bidding reached 451 million euros ($482 million) for each of the six 5 MHz blocks offered in the first round and would continue Tuesday.

Facebook said it will appeal a ruling by a Belgian court ordering it to stop tracking via social plugins the online activities of non-users there, or face a daily fine of $269,000. The court gave Facebook 48 hours to comply with Monday's ruling. The court said Facebook uses a special cookie called “datr” with a two-year life, which the company said it uses to distinguish legitimate visits from illegitimate uses. "We've used the datr security cookie for more than five years to keep Facebook secure for 1.5 billion people around the world. We will appeal this decision and are working to minimize any disruption to people's access to Facebook in Belgium,” a company spokeswoman emailed Tuesday. The court sided with Belgium's data protection authority (DPA), which filed a civil suit in June against the company. In May, the DPA said the datr cookie allows Facebook to track the surfing behaviors of non-users outside of its social networking site. The DPA said "Facebook's argument that in certain cases there is no tracking because the data collected are anonymized or destroyed after some time, is therefore irrelevant here, since initially -- purely by collecting cookies and website data through plug-ins -- personal data were processed." The DPA recommended Facebook provide full transparency about the use of cookies, stop placing unique identifier cookies with non-users and refrain from collecting and using data from users without their "unambiguous and specific consent through an opt-in" service. The Belgium DPA didn't comment on the ruling. In an Oct. 13 blog post, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said that if the company is prevented from using the datr cookie, it would have to treat any visit from Belgium "as an untrusted login and deploy a range of other verification methods for people to prove that they are the legitimate owners of their accounts."

It's time to end leap seconds, which are added on an irregular basis so the Earth's slowing rate of rotation doesn't lead to a gap between regular and atomic clocks, NTIA is advising an ongoing gathering (see 1511050041) of national telecom regulators in Geneva. NTIA, the lead U.S. agency on the issue at the World Radiocommunications Conference, said the topic will be visited later this month at WRC-15, and NTIA worked with the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission to develop the proposal to kill leap seconds in Coordinated Universal Time. "Because the world’s time keepers can’t predict when they will need to add a leap second, computer systems and telecommunications networks around the world must be adjusted manually to account for the extra second added to UTC," said an NTIA blog post Friday. "The most recent addition of the leap second at the end of June caused some Internet outages that were quickly resolved."

The FCC published a notice in Thursday's Federal Register on the agency's plans to waive, effective Dec. 7, its Form 740 certification requirements for RF devices imported between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2016 (see 1510190056). The temporary waiver allows time for the FCC to consider its proposal to eliminate importer declaration requirements entirely (see 1507210072), without imposing new burdens once the use of Customs and Border Protection's automated commercial environment filing system becomes mandatory for FCC-regulated imports is required, the FCC said.

The United Kingdom Home Office sought a bill that it said would transform the law on the use and oversight of police, security and intelligence agencies' investigatory powers. While the bill would provide additional oversight for government surveillance practices, media and privacy groups said it would also erode privacy practices. It would have the effect of "forcing communications service providers to keep a record of their customers’ web browsing histories as well as their calls, e-mails, and other communications, and new restrictions that may hamper the use of end-to-end encryption technologies," said the Center for Democracy and Technology in a statement. A Home Office summary said the bill would introduce a "double-lock" for interception warrants that "cannot come into force until they have been approved by a judge" and establish an investigatory powers commissioner to oversee how such surveillance powers are used. It said the bill would ensure that Internet connection records are retained so police can identify the communications service tied to a device. But CDT legal fellow Sarah St.Vincent said these new powers would "likely violate the UK’s obligations under human rights and EU law. We remain concerned about how thorough that oversight will be, and whether it is actually capable of preventing serious abuses." The Investigatory Powers Bill "is part of a trend towards more surveillance in Europe," said the Computer and Communications Industry Association. It's a "setback for privacy rights," said CCIA Europe Director Christian Borggreen.

An FCC notice proposing to establish undersea cable reporting duties was published in the Federal Register, triggering deadlines for comments of Dec. 3 and replies Dec. 18. The FCC voted 5-0 Sept. 17 to adopt the NPRM to open the rulemaking aimed at collecting timely and systematic information on outages disrupting any of the roughly 60 undersea cables that connect the U.S. to the world (see 1509170047). The agency specifically proposed "to require submarine cable licensees, as a condition of their license, to report on outages involving either lost connectivity or degradation of 50 percent or more of a submarine cable's capacity for periods of at least 30 minutes, regardless of whether the cable's traffic is re-routed," Tuesday's notice said.

The Information Technology Industry Council told the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative Wednesday that increasing data localization practices by foreign governments threaten U.S. and global economic growth. In ITI's comments on the National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers (NTE), the group said members have "experienced a significant increase" in the use of localization measures across the globe. Data localization is the practice of governments employing measures to favor local businesses and enterprises primarily in the information and communications technology space, which ITI said can be done "under the guise of promoting local industries and protecting privacy." These practices have "forced [ITI member companies and others] to make costly adjustments to their operations on the ground, regionally or globally, in order to comply with these measures," ITI said. It identified localization requirements in China, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey and Vietnam, and warned it's possible more governments will consider or put in place similar requirements by the time the USTR's NTE is published. "ITI is greatly concerned about the impact of such digital protectionism on international trade and investment, innovation, and the ability of people and businesses all over the world to benefit from free and open flows of information and data through the Internet and Internet-based technologies," it said. ITI recently released a blog post citing Indonesia's need to address localization practices in order for it to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (see 1510280075). The public comment submission period for the USTR report ended Wednesday, but comments were only being made available by those who filed them, not the government. “As Internet services become a greater part of the global economy,” it will become “more important to monitor digital trade barriers,” the Computer & Communications Industry Association said in comments. CCIA detailed how recent moves "to restrict online information for alleged copyright reasons violates current trade agreements"; how Internet censorship has affected countries in Asia, the Middle East and Russia; and problems companies face following the European Court of Justice’s ruling earlier this month that declared the U.S.-EU safe harbor agreement invalid, in its comments. “As the economy evolves, the NTE will need to increasingly investigate and respond to barriers to digital trade if the Internet and Internet-enabled services are to continue to be export growth leaders,” said CCIA CEO Ed Black in a news release.

Three takeaways from FTC Commissioner Julie Brill’s speech Friday before the Amsterdam Privacy Conference, summarized in her Friday tweets: (1) the European Court of Justice’s “invalidation of Safe Harbor is a loss for transparency and FTC enforcement”; (2) the Schrems decision is an opportunity for a broad, honest, holistic discussion between the U.S. and the European Union on privacy; and (3) privacy discussions on technology need to integrate consumer, law enforcement and national security views. “We should recognize that important protections were lost through the Court’s invalidation of the European Commission’s decision in 2000 to approve safe harbor as a data transfer mechanism,” Brill said in her speech. “And they will continue to be lost if we do not have a durable and protective mechanism for information flow between the U.S. and Europe." Safe harbor’s transparency is unmatched by alternatives, Brill said: “We should create a new data transfer mechanism that strengthens the privacy protections that were in the safe harbor principles.” She said the safe harbor principles -- notice, choice, access, security, use restrictions and “other protections that one would expect from a baseline privacy regime” -- were “very expansive and protective.” Historically, privacy conversations in the U.S. have been largely siloed, Brill said. But as law enforcement asks for access to unencrypted versions of encrypted communications, the “debate has started to chip away at the silos,” Brill said. “Although I believe the U.S. consumer privacy framework is strong and multifaceted, I also believe the U.S. needs to go further with its consumer privacy laws to ensure that we are adequately protecting consumers with respect to these new technologies.” Brill said she supports additional privacy legislation, but she doesn’t believe such legislation is a “prerequisite for a post-Schrems data transfer mechanism.”

Ericsson plans to purchase the operations of software developer Ericpol in Poland and Ukraine, Ericsson said in a news release Thursday. Ericsson has concluded a preliminary share purchase agreement with Ericpol, it said, and approximately 2,000 of the developer's employees will join Ericsson upon completion of the acquisition. Pending regulatory approval, the transaction is expected to finalize during Q1 2016, Ericsson said.