NTIA officials encouraged and aided Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf in March 2014 as he wrote an opinion piece in favor of the now-completed Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition, according to a batch of archived emails that Americans for Limited Government (ALG) obtained in late January as part of its Freedom of Information Act request on analyses of the legal and policy justifications for the handoff. ALG criticized NTIA Thursday for “sitting on” the “most responsive documents” related to the conservative group's FOIA request until after the IANA oversight switchover's Oct. 1 completion (see 1610030042 and 1702020073). Then-NTIA Associate Administrator Fiona Alexander initially contacted Cerf March 19, 2014, the day The Wall Street Journal published a column by former Publisher Gordon Crovitz that criticized the legal justification for the handoff. NTIA announced plans for the switchover the week before (see report in the March 17, 2014, issue). “While the press has gotten better there have been a couple of unhelpful oped’s including” the Crovitz column, Alexander said in an email to Cerf that was also copied to then-NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling. “Obviously those folks are uni[n]formed but our press folks were wondering if you were going to write something.” Cerf said he had already written a commentary supporting the transition but said he was “struggling with the PR team at Google who seem very reluctant to let me get out in front of this because they don’t want this to be about Google. Let me see if we can accelerate the ICANN piece.” Cerf forwarded NTIA officials a copy of his draft, which they believed should more directly counter Crovitz. “Obviously [Crovitz] lacks any technical understanding” of the transition, Alexander said. NTIA suggested Cerf add a paragraph to counter claims that the handoff would lead to government capture and censorship of the domain name system. The version of Cerf's commentary that eventually ran in a May/June 2014 IEEE publication included an amended version of the NTIA-suggested paragraph, though it didn't mention concerns about censorship. NTIA's attempt to influence the content of Cerf's opinion piece may have constituted direct engagement in “propaganda on an issue of public import,” which was prohibited in the FY 2014 omnibus federal spending bill, said ALG Senior Editor Robert Romano in a Friday blog post. That NTIA waited almost three years to release the emails between Cerf and NTIA officials shows the agency knew “it was embarrassing,” Romano said. “But it might have been devastating at the time. The fact that the agency would collude with a vice president at Google and a government contractor, ICANN, illegally as it turned out, in formulating an oped beneficial to Google and the monopolist ICANN, would have been scandalous.” The Department of Commerce, Google and ICANN didn't comment.

NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) plans a Feb. 15-16 workshop in Boulder, Colorado, on tactical encryption and key management (E&KM). RAND Corp. is co-hosting the workshop, which is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NTIA said in a notice set to run in Friday's Federal Register. The workshop aims to “identify solutions to the problem of how to dynamically key and re-key different groups with varying levels of access and for varying lengths of time using existing infrastructure or over an ad hoc network that is reliable and user friendly,” NTIA said. E&KM “is a process that can be onerous, difficult, and time-consuming. We hypothesize that advances in processing efficiency and networking technologies can greatly simplify (or perhaps even automate) E&KM thus enabling secure dynamic coalitions and information flow control in mobile, tactical applications. We further hypothesize that these secure, dynamic coalitions and information control schemes can be constructed and maintained without a central, off-site coordination authority.” ITS hopes the workshop will “look into the future to see what E&KM may look like and will look at the present to see what technologies can be leveraged to take us there,” NTIA said. The workshop will run 8 a.m.-5 p.m. MST both days in the Department of Commerce’s Boulder Laboratories Building 1 Lobby, NTIA said.

Since May, when the boards of three major advertising associations met to discuss the problem with ad-blocking software that's costing billions of dollars in ad revenue, the industry is getting closer to better addressing the issue, said Dan Jaffe, executive vice president-government relations for the Association of National Advertisers, in a Thursday blog post. Since that meeting among ANA, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and Interactive Advertising Bureau, the ad community created the Coalition for Better Ads initiative to develop and implement new worldwide standards for online ads that meet consumer needs, Jaffe said. "We are making major progress in developing data in the U.S. and worldwide on what aspects of advertising are creating the highest levels of consumer annoyance and ad avoidance," he wrote. "We believe that shortly we will be able to provide criteria and data to help advertisers significantly mitigate these problems and lessen incentives for ad blocking." He cited "troubling" statistics from a Wednesday PageFair study that said 11 percent of internet users globally implemented ad blockers. If this continues, blocking could undermine content and information on the internet, most of which is supported through advertising revenue, said Jaffe. The ad industry has taken some of the blame for the rise of ad blockers by allowing annoying and bad advertising to be delivered and not addressing users' fears that some ads contain malware (see 1609090057).

Americans for Limited Government criticized NTIA Thursday for “sitting on” the “most responsive documents” in the conservative group’s Freedom of Information Act request on analyses of the legal and policy justifications for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition until after the switchover’s completion. NTIA released a batch of documents on the IANA oversight handoff to ALG Jan. 26, almost four months after the transition’s Oct. 1 completion (see 1609300065 and 1610030042). ALG claimed the only NTIA documents on legal justification for the handoff were created March 25, 2014 -- 11 days after then-Administrator Larry Strickling announced the transition (see report in the March 17, 2014, issue) and two days after the Wall Street Journal's Gordon Crovitz raised concerns about the legal justification for the transition. “If these documents had been made available in a timely manner, even in the redacted form we now see, [ALG] and others would have had legal recourse to appeal the privileged determination that they were exempt documents,” said ALG President Rick Manning in a news release. “It took almost 3 years to produce the most responsive documents in our FOIA and only now is the agency claiming its privileged exemptions when it is too late to appeal except for the historical record.” The fact “that whatever legal justification existed for the Internet giveaway was sat upon until long after the transition was over” denied critics of the switchover “a critical indication about whether any legal analysis was performed prior to the transition's announcement,” Manning said. NTIA didn’t comment.

As part of its support of Safer Internet Day 2017 -- to be marked on Tuesday -- NCTA launched a video-based parental resource, In Case You Missed It. The video series "covers the latest and greatest websites, apps and products to help parents manage their children’s online and media activities," NCTA said in a blog post Wednesday unveiling the videos. It said the series covers such issues as TV ratings and resources available for determining what apps are child friendly. NCTA said Safer Internet Day will happen in more than 100 nations, with the U.S. host site at ConnectSafely.org and the U.S. steering committee including Common Sense Media, Family Online Safety Institute, iKeepSafe Coalition, Internet Education Foundation, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, National Cyber Security Alliance and National PTA.

D-Link Systems is asking a federal court to dismiss an FTC lawsuit that alleges the company sold insecure wireless routers and internet cameras, endangering people's privacy (see 1701060046). "This is a case of politicized government overreach without justification or any evidence of consumer injury," said attorney Patrick Massari, assistant vice president with the nonprofit Cause of Action Institute that's representing the company, in a Wednesday news release. The motion to dismiss was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Northern California. "To her credit, Acting Chairwoman [Maureen] Ohlhausen voted not to bring this case and has spoken out against the agency filing other lawsuits 'on the eve of a new presidential administration' that are based on a flawed legal theory and lack economic and evidentiary support," he said. Massari said the FTC doesn't have the authority to regulate IoT data security, so its "putative regulation is beyond its legal power." Commissioners in a 2-1 vote, with Ohlhausen dissenting, filed the complaint against D-Link, which has said it would fight the accusations, for alleged inadequate security measures in its devices, leaving them vulnerable to hackers and putting consumers’ privacy at risk. CoA's Massari said the FTC made "vague and unsubstantiated allegations" and speculated about consumers put at risk. He said the commission's suit also violates the company's "due process rights, and will no doubt have a chilling effect on innovation." An FTC spokesman said the commission doesn't comment on ongoing litigation. CoA previously defended LabMD against FTC in an ongoing data breach case that is now before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (see 1701050044). Massari filed an amicus brief for LabMD on behalf of several physicians in that court.

Walmart ditched its Amazon Prime-like ShippingPass membership program (see 1606290078) after less than a year and is refunding customers in full for their subscription, it said on its website Tuesday. “In today's world of e-commerce, two-day free shipping is table stakes. It no longer makes sense to charge for it,” said Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart U.S. eCommerce, in a statement. Walmart replaced the membership-based shipping program with another Amazon-like perk: free two-day shipping. But Walmart’s two-day ship offer -- on more than 2 million products -- has a $35 minimum spend and no membership fee. On the website, Walmart thanked ShippingPass customers for "helping us develop our new 2-day shipping offer." Refunds will be automatically issued to the original form of payment within 30 days, Walmart said. Lore said the new shipping program is “the first of many moves” the retailer will make to improve the customer experience and promote growth. Free shipping applies to items customers shop the most, it said, including baby necessities, pet products, food, cereal and peanut butter, cleaning supplies, beauty products, top electronics and toys.

The FTC said it granted an early termination of the premerger notification waiting period for Oracle’s buy of internet traffic service Dyn, allowing the deal to proceed. The Hart-Scott-Rodino Act requires companies engaged in large mergers and acquisitions to submit to a waiting period during which DOJ and the FTC can review the deal for antitrust issues, the commission said. Oracle said in November it planned to buy Dyn in a bid to extend its cloud computing platform (see 1611210047). Dyn's DynDNS service experienced distributed denial-of-service attacks in October that resulted in outages or latency for many major websites in the U.S., including Netflix and Twitter (see 1610260067 and 1611160051). Oracle didn’t comment Tuesday.

More than one-third of surveyed entities that experienced a cyber breach in 2016 reported revenue losses of more than 20 percent, Cisco reported. More than 50 percent of organizations that experienced a data breach faced public scrutiny as a result, it said Tuesday. Cisco said it surveyed almost 3,000 organizations' chief security officers and security operations leaders. Ninety percent of surveyed organizations that reported significant losses due to breaches said they're now improving their cyberthreat defenses, technologies and processes, including security awareness training for employees and implementing cyber risk mitigation techniques. Cisco found that organizations investigated only 56 percent of security alerts and remediated less than half of the legitimate alerts. “In 2017, cyber is business, and business is cyber -- that requires a different conversation, and very different outcomes,” said Chief Security and Trust Officer John Stewart in a news release. “Relentless improvement is required and that should be measured via efficacy, cost, and well managed risk.”

Twenty-seven percent of internet users in 17 countries said they’re willing to share personal data in exchange for benefits or rewards such as lower costs or personalized service, GfK reported Friday. Those ages 30-40 are most likely to share data such as health, financial, driving records or energy use for rewards, with China (38 percent), Mexico (30 percent) and Russia (29 percent) topping the list. U.S. respondents skewed slightly lower at 25 percent willing to share data (23 percent who disagreed with the statement). Germany (40 percent), France (37 percent) and Brazil (34 percent) have the most internet users unwilling to share data for rewards, the report said. GfK interviewed more than 22,000 consumers ages 15 and older online last summer.