Next year Android users in Europe will be able to choose various search providers when setting up their smartphones, Google Product Management Director Paul Gennai wrote Friday. The change was made to comply with the European Commission’s recent competition decision on Android.

Average revenue per user for standalone pay-TV service declined 10 percent from 2016 to 2018 to $76, blogged Parks Associates Thursday. Consumers’ self-reported spend on non-pay-TV home video entertainment dropped 30 percent per month over the past seven years to just over $20 at the end of 2018, after peaking at nearly $40 in 2014, Parks said. Spending on packaged video media has steadily declined since 2012; movie theater spending fell by 50 percent from 2014 to 2018, it said, while spending on internet video is the only category to hold steady since 2014 at $8-$9 per month. With subscription online video the only growth category for consumer-paid video entertainment beyond pay TV, operators are taking different approaches to leverage the trend, said analyst Brett Sappington. Comcast and Dish are offering subscriptions to third-party over-the-top video services and integrating them into their interfaces to serve as content aggregators; others, including AT&T and Dish, are expanding their online reach, introducing virtual MVPD services, Sappington said. Twenty percent of U.S. broadband households don’t have pay-TV service, said Parks.

Tech entrepreneur and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang criticized Amazon and the role artificial intelligence is going to play in workforce displacement during a Wednesday debate with former Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Commerce Committee member Kamala Harris of California and seven other candidates. The debate was otherwise almost completely devoid of tech and telecom policy mentions. A Tuesday debate included several policy focuses, with Senate Commerce member and 2020 Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota saying rural broadband will be a top priority in her $1 trillion infrastructure proposal (see 1907310035). “Amazon is closing 30 percent of America's stores and malls and paying zero in taxes while doing it,” Yang said Wednesday. Amazon has been a target for Democratic candidates' ire during all four debates this year (see 1906270010 and 1906280053). Yang later warned AI is “going to displace hundreds of thousands of call center workers, truck drivers, the most common jobs in the United States.” Biden said he wouldn't seek to have the U.S. rejoin the original version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which in part deals with digital issues, but instead would seek to renegotiate. President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from TPP in 2017 (see 1701240047). Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, invoked the 2018 false missile alert in Hawaii during her closing statement to highlight her objections to Trump's foreign policy priorities. Gabbard didn't mention the push for legislation, like the Authenticating Local Emergencies and Real Threats (Alert) Act, to address perceived weaknesses in the wireless emergency alert system (see 1904240033).

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is collecting public comments through Sept. 30 on draft cybersecurity feature recommendations for IoT devices, the agency announced Thursday. The draft offers six recommended security features for manufacturers to build into IoT devices: identification, configuration, data protection, logical access to interfaces, software and firmware updates, and cybersecurity event logging. NIST plans an Aug. 13 workshop on the issue.

Online platform data collection practices, market power and content liability protections make it harder for artists to control their own work and make a living, the Artist Rights Alliance wrote Congress and antitrust enforcers Wednesday. Citing Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, the group asked officials to consider creator concerns as they investigate the industry. The group wrote the letter to the House Antitrust Subcommittee, DOJ Antitrust Division and the FTC.

The average American nets about $32,000 annually from free online services, said an Internet Association report Wednesday. That includes benefits from “search, email, maps, video, e-commerce, social media, messaging and music,” IA said. The amount was based on how much a person would “need to be paid to give up a service.”

A website operator that embedded a Facebook "Like" button is subject to EU data protection law, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled Monday. The case, Fashion ID GmbH & Co. KG v. Verbraucherzentrale NRW eV (Case C-40/17), involved a challenge by a German consumer rights organization against Fashion ID, a German online clothing retailer. The seller embedded the "Like" plug-in supplied by Facebook Ireland on its website, causing visitors' browsers to automatically send information about their IP address and browser string to the social media platform, the court said. Those transmissions took place without users having to click on the button, and also allowed Facebook to place cookies on users' devices. The consumer group sued in a national district court to force Fashion ID to stop integrating the plug-in. The case was later referred to the ECJ for interpretation of several provisions of the former data protection directive as replaced by the general data protection regulation (GDPR). Among the court's findings: A website operator that embeds a third-party plug-in on its website resulting in the collection and transmission of a user's personal data is considered a data controller with joint responsibility (here with Facebook) for operations for which it co-decides on the means and purposes for processing the data and a data subject's consent obtained under the directive must be given to a website operator that has embedded the content of a third party. The case is "quite significant," tweeted Hogan Lovells (London) data protection lawyer Eduardo Ustaran. In practice, he added, all website operators using such cookies should contractually apportion responsibilities for the data collection and processing consider which GDPR lawful ground applies, and then explain those data uses in their privacy or cookie policies.

A new Comcast parental control feature announced Tuesday automatically pauses network connectivity in the home to all of a child’s devices once that child's daily time limit is reached. The feature, accessible from the main xFi page, lets parents set a specific amount of time their children can be online each day; separate limits can be set for weekdays and weekends, it said. Comcast cited a Common Sense Media study saying 68 percent of parents feel their teenagers spend too much time using mobile devices.

The global infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud-services market grew 31.3 percent in 2018 to $32.4 billion, up from $24.7 billion in 2017, said Gartner Monday. Amazon continued holding a commanding lead with nearly 48 percent market, followed distantly by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and IBM, it said. "The cloud market’s consolidation favors the large and dominant providers, with smaller and niche providers losing share,” said Gartner. In 2018, the top five IaaS providers had nearly 77 percent of the global IaaS market, up from less than 73 percent in 2017, it said: “Market consolidation will continue through 2019, driven by the high rate of growth for the top providers.”

Walmart's latest pilot program with a self-driving vehicle company is with Palo Alto, California-based Gatik, blogged Tom Ward, Walmart U.S. senior vice president-digital operations. The retailer has been testing autonomous-vehicle use for customer deliveries and transporting goods between its locations, he said. With Gatik, it’s testing an autonomous vehicle to move customer orders on a 2-mile route between two stores in Bentonville, Arkansas, its home base, to learn more about the logistics of integrating autonomous vehicles into its online grocery ecosystem, said Ward.