ICANN transmitted a largely positive report to NTIA Friday on its progress in implementing governance changes required before the planned Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition, as expected (see 1608110062). All of the tasks ICANN needs to perform before the transition were already completed, awaiting approval or in a final review stage as of Friday, ICANN said in the report. Three of NTIA’s recommendations from its June assessment of ICANN’s transition-related plans won’t be addressed before the transition because they require the post-transition Public Technical Identifiers subsidiary in charge of administering the IANA functions “to be in active operation, or coordination with community structures in place only after the transition,” ICANN said. Those tasks still in final review or awaiting approval “will be complete in advance of September 30, 2016 to allow the IANA functions contract to expire,” ICANN said.

FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez will open a Sept. 7 event on ransomware that will feature three panels of private-sector experts and government officials, including an FBI agent, the commission said in a Monday news release. In ransomware, criminals typically encrypt files after they hack into a person's or company's computer and then demand a ransom in exchange for the key to decrypt the files, the FTC said. Some members of Congress also said ransomware is becoming a major problem (see 1604190032). The FTC panels will focus on the scope of ransomware, best defenses against it and how consumers should respond if they've been hit, the release said. The commission's Office of Technology Research and Investigation and New York University's computer science department will present research based on different types of ransomware used, the FTC said. The 1-4:30 p.m. event will be at FTC's Constitution Center offices, 400 7th St. SW.

There’s no single “answer” among semiconductor competitors how to resolve the challenges of autonomous driving “because nobody knows exactly how to get it done,” nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said on an earnings call. When “the automobile we step into is completely autonomous, and it has AI inside and out,” it will be “just an incredible experience,” he said Thursday of artificial intelligence. Autonomous driving’s challenges are “massive,” he said. “Otherwise, we would have done it already. ... We're working with some really, really amazing people to get this done.”

NTIA plans a webinar Wednesday under its Broadband USA program, 2-3 p.m., the first in a monthly series running through Jan. 19, said a notice in Friday's Federal Register. The webinars will be on the third Wednesday of each month to "engage the public and stakeholders with information to accelerate broadband access, improve digital inclusion, strengthen broadband policies, and support local community priorities," it said.

Facebook said new changes to its news feed algorithm will help it predict stories that will be most informative to individual users via a new ranking signal that will be applied to data in its Feed Quality Program. “First, we look at the stories that people tell us they find informative,” said Product Manager-News Feed Vibhi Kant and a pair of company scientists in a Thursday blog post. “People from our Feed Quality Program look at each story in their feed and rank it on a scale of one to five -- one being 'really not informative' and five being 'really informative.' Generally, we’ve found people find stories informative if they are related to their interests, if they engage people in broader discussions and if they contain news about the world around them.” The stories “people rate as informative and really informative help create a new prediction about how informative we think you’ll find each story,” the staff said. The website will use the new prediction signal in combination with the story's relevance data “to best predict stories that you might personally find informative,” Kant and the scientists said. “Informative stories are therefore different for each person and will likely change over time.” Most pages won't see a significant change in distribution because of the new prediction signal, but some may see either a small increase or decrease, Facebook said. The social media company has made multiple changes to its news feed algorithm in recent months following claims that it was censoring politically conservative content from appearing prominently on the feed (see 1605100032, 1606290066 and 1608040053).

The Broadband Forum announced first specifications for a virtual residential gateway. The Network Enhanced Residential Gateway (TR-317) provides requirements for an end-to-end architecture, creating a flexible and agile environment, said the forum in a Wednesday news release. TR-317’s virtual customer premises equipment eliminates the need to provision and attach new services physically at an end user’s residential gateway, enabling service providers to do so from the cloud, it said. Service providers will be able to deploy services faster and personalize end-user packages, and quality of service could be enforced on a per device, per user and per service basis, the forum said. Broadband operators already are working on cloud-based virtual residential gateway services, said David Minodier, network architect at U.K. broadband provider Orange, which led development of TR-317. Network functions virtualization and software defined network techniques allow the delivery of such innovative services from a POP or data center to be implemented, which was not possible before, said Minodier. TR-317 ensures interoperability between the bridged residential gateway at the customer premises and the virtual gateway hosted in the provider’s cloud infrastructure, he said. TR-317 also gives telcos a way to upgrade existing gateway models virtually, enabling new features and services, he said. Local services will be shifted from the home to the network, giving users reliable and expandable virtual storage, which can be provisioned on a “pay-as-you-grow” basis, said the forum. In the TR-317 world, the machine-to-machine (M2M) home automation box will move to the network, “providing enhanced and easily-upgradeable M2M services,” the forum said. Parental controls can be enabled virtually, along with diagnosis, troubleshooting and maintenance services, it said.

Rural consumers continue to trail urban consumers in Internet use despite the advent of smartphones and social media, NTIA said in a webpage post Wednesday on the state of the urban/rural digital divide. NTIA said 75 percent of urban consumers and 69 percent of rural consumers use the internet, continuing a "remarkably consistent" 6-10 percentage point gap that has persisted since 1998, when the agency began gathering data. "This suggests that in spite of advances in both policy and technology, the barriers to Internet adoption existing in rural communities are complex and stubborn," NTIA said. "Americans who were otherwise less likely to use the Internet -- such as those with lower levels of family income or education -- faced an even larger disadvantage when living in a rural area." Rural individuals with higher levels of education or family income don't have significantly lower adoption rates than their urban counterparts, according to the data, which come from NTIA’s Computer and Internet Use Supplement to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. Both agencies are part of the Commerce Department.

Facebook said it's providing expanded tools that will help users better control the advertising they see and address the increasing use of ad blocking software. In a blog post, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook vice president-ads and business platform, wrote that Facebook is making ad preferences easier to use. "If you don’t want to see ads about a certain interest like travel or cats, you can remove the interest from your ad preferences," he wrote. Users can also stop viewing ads from businesses and other organizations that have added them to their customer lists, said Bosworth. He said the company will offer "more powerful controls" to "begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for people who currently use ad blocking software." Some companies pay ad blocking companies to unblock ads, but Bosworth said Facebook will remain a free service with ads supporting its mission. "Rather than paying ad blocking companies to unblock the ads we show -- as some of these companies have invited us to do in the past -- we’re putting control in people’s hands with our updated ad preferences and our other advertising controls," he wrote.

Domain names registry Donuts upped the ante Monday in its lawsuit against ICANN over the auction of the .web generic top-level domain, increasing its proposed damages demand in the gTLD case to $22.5 million -- plus interest -- from its original $10 million damages demand, in an amended complaint (in Pacer). The $22.5 million damages demand better reflects what Donuts' “share” of the $135 million in proceeds from the .web auction would have been if the auction had been private, the registry said in the complaint filed with U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Donuts filed the original version of its suit in July, days before the .web auction. Donuts didn't succeed in temporarily halting the auction over its claims ICANN didn't adequately investigate what it believed to be possible changes in the ownership or control of rival bidder Nu Dot Co (see 1607250051 and 1607270027). Nu Dot Co won the .web auction, then Verisign said it funded the purchase with the understanding that control of .web would pass to the .com domain registry (see 1608010008). Donuts now claims ICANN “intentionally failed to abide by its contractual obligations to conduct a full and open investigation into Nu Dot Co’s admission because it was in ICANN’s interest that the .web contention set be resolved” via a public auction. The Cross-Community Working Group on New gTLD Auction Proceeds is deciding how funds from public gTLD auctions will be spent, since ICANN is prohibited from using the proceeds for its own operations. “ICANN deprived Donuts and the other applicants for the .web gTLD of the right to compete for .web in accordance with established ICANN policy,” Donuts said. “Court intervention is necessary to ensure ICANN’s compliance with its own accountability and transparency mechanisms.” That Donuts’ suspicions about an outside party influencing Nu Dot Co’s participation in the .web auction were correct bolsters the claims they made in their suit against ICANN, but it’s still unclear whether Donuts can prove ICANN’s handling of Donuts’ claims constitutes willful negligence, a domain names industry executive told us. ICANN didn’t comment.

The FTC is suing online contact lens retailer 1-800 Contacts, alleging it secured anticompetitive agreements with at least 14 rivals to "eliminate competition" in internet search advertising auctions that eventually resulted in some consumers paying higher prices for products, the commission said in a Monday news release. Commissioners voted 3-0 to approve the administrative complaint; a trial is scheduled to begin April 11. The FTC said Google and Bing sell ad space on their search engine results pages through computerized auctions. The commission alleged 1-800 Contacts "secured agreements" between 2004 and 2013 with at least 14 competitors to not bid against each other in certain auctions. The agreements stem from lawsuits that 1-800 Contacts brought against rivals for supposedly infringing on its trademarks, said the FTC. The commission said such agreements are "overbroad" and aren't needed to safeguard legitimate trademark interests. "These bidding agreements unreasonably restrain both price competition in search advertising auctions and the availability of truthful, non-misleading advertising," said the complaint, adding that such agreements violate Section 5 of the FTC Act for unfair competition. The agency said the alleged practice deprived customers "of the benefits of vigorous price and service competition," increasing their search costs. In an emailed statement, 1-800 Contacts General Counsel Cindy Williams said the company "strongly disagrees" with the FTC's contention that the agreements were designed to protect its trademark and hinder competition. "1-800 Contacts is confident in its legal position and will vigorously defend its intellectual property rights in response to the administrative complaint filed today by the FTC," she said. Williams said the company has a "long history" of promoting competition and consumer rights, "including championing the passage of the landmark Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act of 2003 that increased convenience and lowered prices for consumers, and opposing recent price fixing by manufacturers."