Technology is poised to disrupt the car purchase process in much the same way it shook up how consumers shop for some other products, said Mark O’Neil, chief operating officer at Cox Automotive, at a National Automobile Dealers Association/J.D. Power event. The automotive market, a business segment that did less than 1 percent of consumer transactions digitally last year, could see as much as 20 percent of sales online by 2022, he said Tuesday here in New York. “If you think about any retail category out there, the consumer inevitably wins in getting it their way.” Meeting with a salesperson, securing financing and haggling over price and trade-in value could be eliminated by having consumers do those steps themselves from home on a dealer’s website, said O'Neil. Consumers are more comfortable with technology every day and will expect to be able to do more online, he said.

Walmart, after abandoning its $49-per-year Amazon Prime-like membership program in February less than a year after launch (see 1701310045), came up with a new way to reward online customers that’s outside of the e-commerce giant’s turf. In a Wednesday blog post, Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart U.S. eCommerce, announced the retailer’s discount program for customers who shop online and pick up the items in store. For customers who prefer home delivery, Walmart will ship items in two days for free, giving customers the free two-day shipping benefit of Amazon Prime without a membership fee. Walmart is leveraging its summer $3 billion purchase of Jet.com for the Pickup Discount program, said Lore, Jet.com's founder. In a post aimed at customers, Mark Ibbotson, executive vice president-central operations of Walmart U.S., said the company is testing pickup solutions including drive-through windows and in-store kiosks. He described the kiosk as a “high-tech vending machine” for online orders that scans a barcode sent to a customer’s smartphone.

Websites that offer free content like movies, TV shows and sports are likely hiding malware that can hijack individuals' computers, steal personal data and hit them with a barrage of advertising, wrote Will Maxson, FTC assistant director-Marketing Practices Division, in a Wednesday blog post. "We recently downloaded movies from five sites that offered them for free. In all five cases, we ended up with malware on our computer. Generally, it served up a slew of unwanted ads." He said downloading pirated content is illegal. Maxson said it's also not a good idea to provide credit card information if some sites ask for it since they may not be legitimate businesses.

ICANN Senior Vice President-Contractual Compliance and Consumer Safeguards Jamie Hedlund urged stakeholders to provide feedback to the organization and its Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review Team on contractual compliance issues. ICANN is collecting comments on CCT-RT’s draft report on whether the organization’s new generic top-level domains program has promoted competition, consumer trust and consumer choice in the domain name system, and whether the gTLD program’s procedures are effective. Hedlund said the Registry Stakeholder Group and the Generic Names Supporting Organization’s IP Constituency already submitted recommendations to ICANN on contractual compliance issues that are “clear and specific and can be assessed for feasibility, cost and effort.” CCT-RT plans to issue a report after it reviews feedback that will detail “changes that we will undertake as well as a rationale for not undertaking others,” Hedlund said in a blog post.

Acting FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen provided general information, tips and resources to help consumers prevent identity theft of their children's, medical and tax data, during a Wednesday Twitter chat with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Ohlhausen said unpaid medical debts could damage a person's credit or ruin credit "so your child may be denied credit and/or loans for school, car, or a job." She said people should check with credit agencies if they're an ID theft victim, including requesting a manual search of their children's Social Security numbers. "Kids don’t have credit reports -- unless someone is using their info for fraud," she tweeted. Ohlhausen said people should beware of Internal Revenue Service scammers claiming people owe taxes and threaten lawsuit, arrest or deportation as well as phishing emails seeking employee information from organizations. She said people should keep tax records forever and shred other records after seven years to prevent tax ID theft. When filing taxes, people should file early and use a secure connection, not public Wi-Fi, she added. The chat used hashtags #ChildIDTheft, #MedIDTheft, #TaxIDTheft and #VeteranIDTheftChat.

Updates to systems to allow universal acceptance of domain names that use non-Latin based scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese or Cyrillic, is a $9.8 billion opportunity for growth in online revenue, the Universal Acceptance Steering Group said Tuesday in a white paper based on the results of commissioned Analysys Mason study. ICANN's new generic top-level domain rollout resulted in the proliferation of domain names using gTLDs that are longer than the legacy three-character TLDs or internationalized domain names (IDNs) that use non-Latin scripts, UASG said. Wider technical support for IDNs would bring up to 17 million new users online who use non-Latin scripts, UASG said. Technical updates aimed at fixing bugs that cause rejection on IDNs would alone increase revenue by $3.6 billion yearly, UASG said. “To excel in the long run, organizations should seize the opportunity -- and responsibility -- to ensure that their systems work with the common infrastructure of the Internet -- the domain name system," said UASG Chairman Ram Mohan in a news release. Universal acceptance “unlocks a significant economic opportunity and provides a gateway to the next billion Internet users by ensuring a consistent and positive experience for Internet users globally," Mohan said: "Governments and NGOs will be better able to serve their citizens and constituencies if they adopt” universal acceptance.

E Ink and Sony Semiconductor Solutions formed a joint venture to develop, produce, sell and license products that use electronic paper displays, they announced Monday: "It will aim to create new electronic paper display products and systems, and grow the market of ePaper-based solutions.”

Seventy-nine percent of U.S. citizens are worried about the privacy and security of their digital data and 63 percent said they would feel more confident if government agencies and service providers had stronger policies, said Accenture in a Wednesday news release on a survey. The online poll of nearly 3,500 Americans, conducted in September and October, also found 74 percent didn't have confidence in government to keep data private and secure and 65 percent weren't assured law enforcement could investigate and prosecute cybercrimes. About 30 percent of respondents said they were a victim of cybercrime, the poll said. Sixty-six percent of respondents also said they would sacrifice convenience for better security. “This survey confirms that ‘cyber insecurity’ is pervasive, with citizens feeling concerned and vulnerable,” said Lalit Ahluwalia, who heads Accenture’s security work governments in North America. The poll, done by Market Strategy Group, had a margin of error of plus/minus 2 percent, with most respondents between 36 and 65 years old.

The New York Legislature passed a version of the FY 2018 budget Monday without the controversial marketplace sales tax. The proposed tax, included in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) original FY 2018 budget proposal, would have required “marketplace providers” to collect New York’s state and local sales taxes on any items shipped into the state from out-of-state sellers. TechNet and the Web Enabled Retailers Helping Expand Retail Employment (WE R HERE) Coalition campaigned against the proposed tax (see 1703070034). Cuomo agreed to jettison the marketplace sales tax proposal from the final budget and didn’t comment on the decision in a Monday statement lauding the budget’s passage. The online sales tax proposal’s removal “is a win for online shoppers, e-commerce businesses, and future startups that decide to locate in New York State,” said TechNet Executive Director-Northeast Region Matthew Mincieli in a statement. “This measure was bad policy that would have set a dangerous precedent across the country.”

Akamai completed its purchase of digital performance management company Soasta, Akamai said in a Friday news release. Akamai announced the all-cash deal last week (see 1703290069).