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."

Internet connections nationwide climbed 9 percent year over year to 342 million in June 2015, the FCC Wireline Bureau said Friday in an August report. Most growth came from a rise in mobile subscriptions, it said. During the one-year period, U.S. mobile internet connections increased 12 percent to 242 million in June 2015, the bureau said. The number of fixed connections increased 4 percent to 100 million total, it said. About 37.5 percent of fixed connections had downstream speeds between 25 Mbps and 100 Mbps, it said. But 62.6 percent were slower than that, including 6.8 percent with speeds slower than 3 Mbps. The median downstream speed of all reported fixed connections was 24 Mbps and the median upstream speed was 3 Mbps, it said. For mobile connections, the FCC found that 25.8 percent had speeds higher than 6 Mbps, 27.8 percent had speeds between 3 and 6 Mbps, 27.6 percent had speeds between 1 and 3 Mbps and the remaining 19.2 percent had speeds below 1 Mbps. The report looks at carrier data reported in Form 477 and defines a connection as having a speed of 200 kbps in at least one direction.

Nearly half of Americans polled said they were victimized by an online scam or had their credit card information or identity stolen, leading a majority to say the internet has become less safe, said a Digital Citizens Alliance survey report released Thursday. In the July 27-29 online survey of 1,215 Americans, 46 percent said they were defrauded or had their financial and personal data stolen, with one in three reporting a monetary loss. As a result, 52 percent said they felt the internet was less safe than five years ago, with only 12 percent saying it was more safe, the survey found. It said 71 percent want tougher federal and state laws against online criminals. "It's a bad sign when Americans think the internet is becoming less safe, so it's vital that governmental entities such as the Federal Trade Commission and others ensure that crime does not pay," said Tom Galvin, the group's executive director, in a news release. The survey also said 69 percent reported finding malware on their computers, and 42 percent said their credit card information was stolen and used. Plus, one in five reported either their computer or company's systems had been hacked at some time, the survey said. Vrge Analytics conducted the survey, with a margin of error of 4 percent.

Facebook will flag phrases frequently used in click-bait headlines to reduce the amount of spam or number of misleading stories appearing in users’ news feeds, the social network said in a news release Thursday. It listed as one example of a click-bait headline, “He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe.” To root out such stories, the company “categorized tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by considering two key points: (1) if the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is; and (2) if the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader,” the company said. “A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify a large set of clickbait headlines. From there, we built a system that looks at the set of clickbait headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines.” Facebook previously tried to reduce click-bait in 2014 by removing posts to content where clickers spent little time before returning to the social media site. More recently, the company tweaked its news feed algorithm to favor content posted by family and friends (see 1606290066). Also, Facebook faced pressure in recent months over allegations it suppressed conservative viewpoints in the trending topics of its news feed (see 1605100032 and 1605170068).

Despite efforts to curb bullying, harassment and threats on social media, such behavior hasn't gone down much over the past two years, said a survey of 1,017 adults released Thursday by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Rad Campaign and Lincoln Park Strategies. Overall, 22 percent say they experienced harassment in 2016, down from 25 percent in 2014, said a news release. But the survey found online sexual harassment declined by almost half to 27 percent of people this year, while online political harassment nearly doubled to 30 percent of respondents in 2016. Seventy-two percent of millennials are harassed by someone they know and 63 percent of online harassment occurs on Facebook, the survey said. "Clearly we need to institute better tools, algorithms, and policies to support and empower people online, such as better methods for reporting harassment, as well as more effective and timely responses from the social networks themselves," said Rad Campaign's Allyson Kapin, a social media consultant.

Tesla “cannot sneeze without there being a national headline” about autonomous vehicles, said CEO Elon Musk in an earnings Q&A. He was asked whether the company, in order to build public support for self-driving cars, plans to be more “transparent” in its reporting of autonomous-vehicle incidents, such as the highly publicized fatal accident in Florida involving a Tesla Model S in autopilot mode (see 1607010052). Tesla as a standard practice shares its autonomous-vehicle incident data with regulators “as soon as we know it,” as it did in the Florida fatality “certainly weeks before” the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration opened a formal probe into the crash, he said. “We're not totally clear on why they opened the investigation, because they actually had all the information before they made a formal investigation.” Tesla thinks “there wasn't really anything more to learn” from opening a formal probe, he said. NHTSA representatives didn’t comment Thursday. "Full autonomy is going to come a hell of a lot faster than anyone thinks it will,” said Musk. It’s just “really a software limitation” that’s standing in the way of developing cars with “full autonomy,” Musk said.