The Supreme Court requested supplemental briefs on whether plaintiffs have the right to sue Google in a case involving its $8.5 million data privacy settlement (see 1810310043). The high court asked the parties and solicitor general Tuesday to address “whether any named plaintiff has standing such that the federal courts have Article III jurisdiction over this dispute.” The court was asked to weigh legitimacy of the cy pres settlement to charitable and academic organizations instead of being divided among many alleged victims. Supplemental briefs are due Nov. 30, replies Dec. 21.

Intel proposed draft online privacy legislation that would grant the FTC rulemaking authority and govern platforms and third parties by “fair information practice principles.” Such a bill would direct the agency to deliver to Congress annual reports with “recommendations to modify existing federal privacy laws which have become unnecessary or inconsistent by the provisions” of the bill.

NTIA and Verisign agreed Thursday to extend through 2024 the cooperative agreement allowing Verisign to administer the root zone file and run the .com and .net domain registries, repealing the $7.85 .com domain price increase cap NTIA included when it last extended the agreement. The 2012 cap was set to expire this month. Repeal lets Verisign pursue a change in its registry agreement with ICANN that could result in up to a 7 percent annual increase in .com domain name prices beginning in 2020, an amendment said. The move “provides Verisign the pricing flexibility” to potentially “increase wholesale .com prices,” in line with the Trump administration's “policy priorities,” NTIA said. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and other GOP lawmakers who were critical of the 2016 Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition raised concerns that year about the proposed extension of Verisign’s contract with ICANN over domain pricing (see 1608150052). The new pact adds language committing Verisign to “operate the .com registry in a content neutral manner and that Verisign will participate in ICANN processes that promote the development of content neutral policies” for Domain Name System operation. NTIA clarified the company is barred from operating as a .com top-level domain registrar, not from being a registrar for other TLDs.

BBC’s iPlayer service will stream the upcoming natural-history series Dynasties in 4K with hybrid log-gamma HDR, beginning Nov. 11, said the broadcaster Wednesday. Audiences will need an internet connection of at least 24 Mbps for the full 3840x2560 image, which will be streamed at 25 frames a second, it said. “Dynasties is exactly the kind of landmark BBC programme that audiences want to see in Ultra HD,” said Matthew Postgate, BBC chief technology and product officer, in a statement. “We’ve been trialling Ultra HD over the past couple of years as we reinvent the BBC, and it’s clear that people enjoy the increased quality.” The BBC's Ultra HD trials included 4K HDR streams this summer of the royal wedding, the World Cup and Wimbledon tennis, said Postgate.

The FTC’s sixth policy hearing will focus on the role of data on competition and innovation and antitrust analysis of mergers, the agency announced. Scheduled for Nov. 6-8, speakers include Competition Bureau Deputy Director Gail Levine, Competition Bureau acting Deputy Director Haidee Schwartz, ACT|The App Association Executive Director Morgan Reed, Computer & Communications Industry Association Competition & Regulatory Policy Director Marianela Lopez-Galdos and Software & Information Industry Association Senior Vice President-Public Policy Mark MacCarthy. The seventh policy hearing will focus on algorithms, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, the agency said. Scheduled for Nov. 13-14, speakers include Competition Bureau Director Bruce Hoffman, National Institute of Standards and Technology Senior Privacy Policy Advisor Naomi Lefkovitz, Microsoft Research Senior Researcher Jennifer Wortman Vaughan and Google Senior Research Scientist Martin Wattenberg.

The FTC should investigate whether Android apps manipulate children into watching advertisements and making purchases, some 20 consumer and health advocates wrote the agency Tuesday. Citing a University of Michigan Mott Children’s Hospital study, the groups question 135 children’s apps “marketed to or played by children under five.” Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog, Electronic Privacy Information Center and Public Citizen signed. “These apps routinely lure young children to make purchases and watch ads, though they are marketed to parents as appropriate for young children,” they wrote. Google and the FTC didn’t comment.

A federal judge ordered a New Jersey-based hacker to pay $8.6 million in restitution and serve six months of house arrest for leading a cyberattack on Rutgers University’s network, DOJ said Friday. U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp sentenced Paras Jha, 22, for launching “a series of” distributed denial of service attacks on the Rutgers network November 2014-September 2016. The attacks “effectively shut down Rutgers University’s central authentication server, which maintained, among other things, the gateway portal through which staff, faculty, and students delivered assignments and assessments,” DOJ said.

IBM agreed to buy Red Hat in a $34 billion deal. "It changes everything about the cloud market," said IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, saying her company will become the biggest hybrid cloud provider and looking toward a future where companies move business applications there, not just rent cloud computing. Citing concerns about debt IBM will likely take on, Standard & Poor's cut its credit rating a notch and said further downgrade is possible. Monday, the first day of regular trading after the deal, Red Hat stock rose to less than the $190 per share cash price. Red Hat didn't comment. The stock closed 45 percent higher Monday at $169.63, an 11 percent discount to the takeover price.

NTIA shouldn't promote a privacy enforcement framework (see 1810220032) modeled after new laws in Europe and California that limit collection and use of data, Technology Policy Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Lenard commented in docket 180821780-8780-01. “Collecting and analyzing large amounts of data is the basis of much, if not most, of the innovation that has taken place on the internet over the past 20 years,” Lenard said Friday. The current FTC model is “ex post enforcement based on actual harms,” he wrote, and laws in California and the EU “use an ex ante regulatory approach.”

The Department of Homeland Security should establish a civilian cybersecurity corps modeled after the Civil Air Patrol, Coast Guard Auxiliary or volunteer firefighters, New America said in a report Thursday. The corps should be federally funded but run at the state and local levels, wrote cybersecurity policy fellow Natasha Cohen and senior fellow Peter Warren Singer.