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.

Google opposes laws mandating proactive content filtering and monitoring, “overly rigid timelines for content removal” or other “harsh penalties” for platforms acting in good faith, Senior Vice President-Global Affairs Kent Walker blogged Thursday. Industry, government, society and users should share content moderation responsibility, he said, supporting industry transparency reports. He cited ongoing debate about the best regulatory approaches, including Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the EU’s e-Commerce Directive.

The FTC and Facebook are negotiating a multibillion dollar settlement of the agency’s investigation of the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, The Washington Post reported Thursday. The settlement, which would need judicial OK, could include a more stringent agency order on the company’s privacy practices. The agency and company didn’t comment.

The FTC will continue its competition and consumer protection hearings in March and April, including a March 25 roundtable with state attorneys general, the agency announced Wednesday. The hearings were suspended during the recent partial government shutdown. A March 20 hearing will address broadband markets. The FTC’s “role in a changing world” is set for March 25-26, consumer privacy April 9-10 and merger retrospectives April 12.

Millions of iPhone and MacBook owners “continue to suffer harm” through Apple’s “coercive policies” of requiring “two-factor authentication” cybersecurity protections on their devices, alleged a complaint (in Pacer) seeking class-action status. Once 2FA is enabled on a device either by default or during a software update, Apple requires owners to access their accounts through a laborious “extraneous logging in procedure” that locks them out of their devices after 14 days if they don’t comply, said the complaint Friday in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Apple “does not get user consent” to enable 2FA, a feature that interferes with consumers’ everyday use of their personal devices, in violation of the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and other statutes, it said. “When a consumer purchases an Apple device, the purchased Apple device becomes the personal property of the consumer. Apple no longer has any ownership or property rights to the Apple devices after sale.” Yet when the company enables 2FA on “owned devices,” it makes them “inaccessible for intermittent periods of time,” said the complaint. It seeks money damages and an order barring Apple from enabling 2FA without customers’ permission. The tech provider didn’t comment Monday.

Apple released a software fix Thursday for the Group FaceTime glitch (see 1901290037). In the iOS 12.1.4 update, Apple described the flaw's impact, saying the initiator of a Group FaceTime call “may be able to cause the recipient to answer.” In the patch, it said: “A logic issue existed in the handling of Group FaceTime calls. The issue was addressed with improved state management.” The update is available for iPhone 5s and later smartphones, iPad Air and later tablets and the sixth-generation iPod touch. Apple credited Grant Thompson, the 14-year-old Texas student, whose mother, Michele, repeatedly pinged Apple about the flaw. The teenager could be eligible for Apple’s bug bounty program for bringing the hack to light, said reports.

While 28 percent of U.S. broadband households are familiar with time-of-use rate programs, only 18 percent report their utility offers one, said Parks Associates Wednesday. Of those who have been offered a TOU plan, 38 percent signed up, said analyst Brad Russell. Familiarity with these programs hasn’t budged much since 2015, Russell said, but smart home devices such as smart thermostats could open a new line of communication with consumers to boost familiarity and convey benefits. They could also help reduce consumers' fears of loss of control, the top inhibitor to TOU enrollment, said the analyst.