The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is wrong to propose lowering the de minimis threshold on shipments from Canada and Mexico, said the Internet Association. A lower threshold would mean more goods crossing borders could be subject to duties. "A consistent, high de minimis threshold benefits the entire American e-commerce system, including thousands of small businesses that use the internet to export and import," said IA Director-Trade Policy Jordan Haas Wednesday. USTR’s proposed provision in legislation implementing the new North American Free Trade Agreement “would force small businesses to navigate a complicated, confusing net of customs rules,” said Haas. Businesses complained that even the concessions won in the new NAFTA are complicated and confusing, because Mexico and Canada have different de minimis levels for sales taxes and for customs duties.

Smart speakers are the most prevalent smart home controller, used by 35 percent of smart home owners, Parks Associates blogged Thursday. Five percent of U.S. broadband households use their smart speaker as a hub vs. 3 percent that use a home security system and 2 percent with independent control hubs. Most smart homeowners operate their devices individually, but voice control's rise and the growing number of connected devices in homes is nudging more toward centralized control, said analyst Dina Abdelrazik. Such homes average more than 10 devices, and voice is emerging as a key interface for managing them, she said. "A smartphone app may be sufficient for houses with just one device, but when people get their fourth or fifth product, using individual apps for each device creates friction."

As global pay-TV competition further intensifies, “deployment of next-generation content delivery solutions to provide the best user experience across different video platforms is crucial for the success of service providers,” said ABI Research Thursday. It forecasts video streaming services will top 585 million subscriptions worldwide in 2019. ABI sees 5G network deployments as a “catalyst” in mobile video consumption, “driving the requirement of efficient video delivery solutions,” it said. Ultra HD and augmented- and virtual-reality video applications “are also expected to drive the deployment of edge computing platforms for content delivery,” it said. Edge computing can greatly reduce latency by moving the data source closer to end users, it said.

The general data protection regulation must be defended but also needs honest evaluation, a Wednesday Computers, Privacy & Data Protection conference heard, livestreamed from Brussels. GDPR has been in effect for eight months, and the European Commission is monitoring what countries are doing and how well people understand their rights, said Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality Commissioner Vera Jourova. "We have to start differentiating between consumers and citizens" to ensure personal data isn't used in the political process for targeting people and spreading fake news, she said. The EC plans a conference in June to assess GDPR costs and benefits. There have been improvements in awareness and data processing, but more cooperation is needed among data protection authorities, said Marit Hansen, data protection commissioner of Land Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. The regulation is "slowly developing its potential" and its "teething problems" will be solved sooner rather than later, she said. GDPR faces two big threats -- avoidance and denial -- but it must be defended because of its link with democracy, said Gloria Gonzalez Fuster, of Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Six EU governments haven't implemented it, and some like Poland lack money and resources to do so, said Member of the European Parliament Michal Boni, of the European People's Party and Poland. European Digital Rights is concerned about rule "flexibilities," said Anna Fielder, senior policy adviser with the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, speaking for EDRi. This includes language that lets political parties process personal data without explicit consent, which is happening in the U.K., Spain and Romania, she said. The EC is creating a European culture of privacy out of different national rules and processes, said Renate Nikolay, Jourova's head of cabinet. Europe is the "first mover" in privacy and will lead the global standard if it can make the law work uniformly, she said. Some aspects have worked, said Google Public Policy Manager Lanah Kammourieh Donnelly: It has led many businesses to boost processes and products, with Google having 500-plus people, many in Europe, working on privacy. But the harmonization the regulation aimed for hasn't happened, and more work is needed on standards, she said.

Government defendants would file their summary judgment motion Feb. 15 on journalist Jason Prechtel's lawsuit against the FCC and the General Services Administration over handling of Freedom of Information Act requests for electronic comment submission details, DOJ proposed (in Pacer) Tuesday to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Prechtel v. FCC, No. 17-1835-CRC. DOJ proposed that plaintiff's opposition and cross motion be due April 8, defendants' opposition and reply April 22 and plaintiff's reply May 13, noting plaintiff consented. It was giving the court notice, as requested, that appropriations legislation resuming department funding was enacted Friday.

“The best things Amazon will deliver to Queens won’t come in a box,” says an Amazon flyer that appeared in Queens residential mailboxes this weekend trumpeting its new Long Island City headquarters. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), a Queens native who spearheaded the bid to land Amazon, calls the deal a “lightning rod” for “rhetoric” on both political “extremes” (see 1811190012). Wednesday’s hearing is before the council’s Finance Committee. The council promises to give the public the chance to testify at a future hearing and encourages questions to the live hearings through social media. The theme of the first hearing Dec. 12, "Exposing the Closed-Door Process,” reflected council frustrations. The Queens development is one of the two HQ2s, with the other in Northern Virginia (see 1811130013).

Facebook will create a board of up to 40 experts on digital content, privacy, free expression, human rights, journalism, civil rights, safety and other areas to consult on content moderation, it said Monday. The company will decide over the next six months board size, term length and how content cases are selected, said Vice President-Global Affairs and Communications Nick Clegg. The draft suggests three-year terms, “automatically” renewable once. Workshops will be in Singapore, Delhi, Nairobi, Berlin, New York, Mexico City and elsewhere.

The ICANN committee working on EU general data protection regulation expects to deliver its final report early next month. The Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) Team on a temporary specification for global top-level domain registration data got 42 unique comments, including from nine ICANN community groups, and from companies and other organizations. "From the outset of this EPDP, we knew the work before us would be challenging and require patience, flexibility, and hard work," blogged Generic Names Supporting Organization Council Liaison to EPDP Team Rafik Dammak Thursday. ICANN says it "has consulted with contracted parties, European data protection authorities, legal experts, and interested governments and other stakeholders to understand the potential impact of the GDPR to Personal Data that is Processed by certain participants in the gTLD domain name ecosystem (including Registry Operators and Registrars)."

Amazon disputed study results about its Rekognition system in a Friday report that MIT Media Lab found the technology had much more difficulty telling the gender of female faces and darker-skinned faces in photos than similar services from IBM and Microsoft. It misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft's technology mistook darker-skinned women for men 1.5 percent of the time. The results published were based on facial analysis “and not facial recognition,” an Amazon spokesperson emailed, quoting Matt Wood, a member of Amazon Web Services’ machine learning team. “Analysis can spot faces in videos or images and assign generic attributes such as wearing glasses; recognition is a different technique by which an individual face is matched to faces in videos and images.” It's impossible to draw a conclusion on the accuracy of facial recognition for any use based on results obtained using facial analysis, said Wood, noting the study didn’t use the latest version of Rekognition and results didn’t represent how a customer would use the service today. Using an updated version with similar data, “we found exactly zero false positive matches with the recommended 99% confidence threshold,” he said. Amazon continues to improve the technology.

Silicon Labs is sampling Wi-Fi modules and transceivers it says use half the power of competitors, have built-in security and superior RF blocking performance. Production quantities are due in Q2, it said Wednesday.