Broadcom released what it says is a more affordable Wi-Fi chip for smartphones. The BCM43752 “extends the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 to the broader smartphone market where high performance and total solution cost are equally important design considerations,” Broadcom said Monday. The chip “brings together the latest innovations in Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 innovations.”

A tech culture that works to “defeat legitimate law enforcement activities” won't end well, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Thursday at the Wharton School in Philadelphia. “Innovators should place security on the same footing as novelty and convenience.” He cited cyberattacks, IP theft and fraud as related threats.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) and state Rep. Marc Levine (D) on Thursday unveiled legislation requiring businesses to notify consumers of compromised passport numbers and biometric information. The bill is a response to the Marriott data breach (see 1901140033). Marriott notified consumers, but current law “does not require companies to report breaches if only consumers’ passport numbers have been accessed,” the officials said.

The FTC should investigate whether Facebook improperly targeted children for in-game purchases, 17 consumer groups wrote the agency Thursday. Common Sense Media, Center for Digital Democracy, Center for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Electronic Privacy Information Center signed. The groups ask the agency to determine whether Facebook violated the FTC Act's Section 5 and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. They said internal documents show Facebook employees “called the practice ‘friendly fraud’ and referred to kids who spent large amounts of money as ‘whales,’ a casino-industry term for super high rollers.” The documents were unsealed from a 2012 class-action lawsuit settled in 2016. The company didn’t comment. The FTC confirmed receiving the letter.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said Thursday the Trump administration is focused on maintaining confidence in the Privacy Shield and preventing international barriers to cross-border data flows and digital trade. OSTP’s Science & Technology Highlights report cites privacy efforts from NTIA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (see 1811090050 and 1812170032). The proper balance is allowing users to “benefit from dynamic uses of their information, while still expecting organizations to appropriately minimize risks to users’ privacy,” the report said. It cites President Donald Trump’s executive order directing federal agencies to “prioritize investments” in artificial intelligence R&D (see 1902110054). It referred to Trump's remarks about technologies that “could improve virtually every aspect of our lives, create vast new wealth for American workers and families, and open up bold, new frontiers in science, medicine, and communication.” The report cites Trump signing the first national cybersecurity strategy in 15 years (see 1809200055) and calling for cyber collaboration across all government agencies. It cites efforts to develop the “world’s most powerful and smartest supercomputers” partly through the Department of Energy, advanced computing systems and National Science Foundation cloud computing partnerships.

Microsoft will expand AccountGuard, a cybersecurity threat detection service, to 12 new European countries, Corporate Vice President-Customer Security and Trust Tom Burt blogged Wednesday. Part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program, AccountGuard is used by political candidates, parties, campaign offices, think tanks and nonprofits. The new countries are France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain.

Policy recommendations for the next round of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are expected to go to ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization (GSNO) Council for consideration in Q3, an ICANN official said Wednesday. The subsequent procedures working group is considering whether changes are needed to the way the 2012 round of new gTLDs was handled, Julie Hedlund, who provides GNSO policy support to the panel, said at the Middle East DNS Forum in Dubai. The working group started "from the assumption of the status quo": If the existing scheme worked well, it won't recommend modifications. Several topics under discussion are of particular interest to the Middle East, Hedlund noted. One is the applicant support program, which wasn't used much in the 2012 round because of poor outreach efforts among other things, she said. The group is examining whether some potential candidates for support might not see the business case for applying for new gTLDs or whether the environment they're working in might not be ready to support a domain name registry. Other relevant issues include concerns about how community-based gTLD applications are evaluated, and inconsistencies between GNSO policy recommendations for geographic names at the top level and how those policies were carried out in the last round. DNS Africa encountered several roadblocks in its quest for gTLDs such as .africa and .durban, said founder Calvin Browne. His organization didn't qualify for applicant support, which created financial problems, and there were issues with "Americanisms," such as insurance requirements that South Africa's insurance industry didn't understand, and that South African and U.S. banking systems couldn't talk to each other, Browne said. For the next round, ICANN fees will be a "major hindrance": A $20,000 annual fee for a gTLD with 3,000 domain name registrations works out to around $8 per name, which hampers innovation.

A smooth shift from IPv4 to IPv6 isn't likely, the Internet Governance Project reported Wednesday. Its economic study for ICANN on how migration might play out found that "the most likely scenario is ... a mixed world for the next 20 years." Authors Brenden Kuerbis and Milton Mueller stressed that the conclusion "is just an educated forecast." The study focused on network operators' incentives to switch. It noted one or two major autonomous systems (AS's) have converted as much as 90 percent of their network to IPv6 in a few markets, while other major AS's in the same market haven't deployed it at all, giving IPv6 deployers no competitive advantage. The study also found that due to the added IPv6 deployment cost, there's a "strong positive correlation" between a country's per capita GDP wealth and country-level IPv6 deployment levels. The good news is that IPv6 is unlikely to "become an orphan" because for some network operators its deployment might make economic sense. The bad news is that deployers must maintain backward compatibility with IPv4, which eliminates many network effects that could create pressure to transition to IPv6. The most likely scenario for greater IPv6 rollout is deployment costs might shrink as legacy infrastructures are taken out of production and software incompatibilities are resolved, they said. IPv4 address scarcity could push the world into convergence since the rising price of such numbers and operational costs of network address translation systems spur IPv6 rollout. It's also possible big cloud and content providers could leverage their position to prod the rest of the world to move to IPv6 if there were a major economic benefit to doing so, but neither that benefit nor the method they would use to facilitate convergence is clear. Given the vast number of countries with no discernible IPv6 deployment, concentration in developing nations, and the presence of many enterprise networks that don't need to grow, it's hard to envision a clean convergence on IPv6 any time soon, the report found.

Twitter will expand U.S. political advertising policies to the EU, India and Australia starting in March, the platform announced Monday. Political advertisers in those regions will now have to be certified, Twitter said, citing a need for transparency and protecting “the health of the public conversation on our service.” Twitter and Facebook in 2018 endorsed stricter political ad regimes spurred by legislation introduced (see 1811020046) by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Mark Warner, D-Va.

Ultra Wide Band Alliance members met staff from the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology, including Chief Julius Knapp, on 6 GHz proceeding concerns. “Current proposed unlicensed broadband deployment, at the requested power levels, bandwidth, and [out-of-band emissions] would effectively render many UWB products, services and applications useless,” the alliance said, posted Friday in docket 17-183. “Consider mitigation solutions that will continue to allow for unlicensed UWB technologies to successfully coexist with incumbent users in the 6 GHz band and provide valuable functionality.” Comments were due Friday on an NPRM (see 1902150030). Representatives from Alteros, Bosch, DecaWave, iRobot and Zebra attended.