Reuters

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, vowed to pare back outdated commission regulations, but declined to say if he will move quickly to overturn the Obama administration's landmark network neutrality rules. One top priority is "to remove unnecessary or counterproductive regulations from the books," Chairman Pai said after he chaired his first meeting.

Nearly 80 rights groups accused Facebook of "racially biased censorship" and failing to be more transparent about its removal policies and cooperation with law enforcement, adding to criticism the company has faced in recent months over its management of content on its network of 1.8 billion users. The sharp rebuke, sent in response to a December letter from Facebook Senior Vice President Joel Kaplan, reflected increasing impatience among advocacy groups that say Facebook has inadequately addressed their concerns despite repeated promises of action from senior executives.

Instead, the groups wrote, Kaplan's response "merely explains current, publicly available Facebook policies and fails to address the modest solutions to racially biased censorship we presented in earlier letters and meetings." SumOfUs, Center for Media Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union were among the signatories. In his letter, Kaplan acknowledged Facebook's community operations team "sometimes get things wrong" but said the company was committed to correcting mistakes and working with outside partners.

Alphabet’s Google is racing to hire more conservatives for its lobbying and policy arm, trying to get a foothold in President-elect Donald Trump’s Washington after enjoying a uniquely close relationship with the administration of President Barack Obama.

In the weeks since the Nov 8 election, Google has ramped up efforts to hire Republican lobbying firms and in-house lobbyists to change the composition of its Washington office, apparently. The company also posted an advertisement for a manager for conservative outreach and public policy partnership, seeking a "liaison to conservative, libertarian and free market groups." While the position is not new, it gives Google a chance to make a hire that reflects the new political climate.

The Supreme Court sided with Samsung in its big-money smartphone patent fight with Apple, throwing out an appeals court ruling that said the South Korean company had to pay a $399 million penalty to its American rival for copying key iPhone designs. The justices in their 8-0 ruling sent the case back to the lower court for further proceedings.

The decision gives Samsung another chance to try to get back a big chunk of the money it paid Apple in December following a 2012 jury verdict that it infringed Apple's iPhone patents and mimicked its distinctive appearance in making the Galaxy and other competing devices. The court held that a patent violator does not always have to fork over its entire profits from the sales of products using stolen designs, if the designs covered only certain components and not the whole thing. The ruling followed a ferocious legal battle between the world's top two smartphone manufacturers that began in 2011 when Apple sued Samsung, asserting that its rival stole its technology and the iPhone's trademarked appearance.

A last-ditch effort in the Senate to block or delay rule changes that would expand the US government's hacking powers failed Nov 30, despite concerns the changes would jeopardize the privacy rights of innocent Americans and risk possible abuse by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) attempted three times to delay the changes, which will take effect Dec 1 and allow US judges will be able to issue search warrants that give the FBI the authority to remotely access computers in any jurisdiction, potentially even overseas. His efforts were blocked by Sen John Cornyn (R-TX), the Senate's second-ranking Republican. The changes will allow judges to issue warrants in cases when a suspect uses anonymizing technology to conceal the location of his or her computer or for an investigation into a network of hacked or infected computers, such as a botnet. In a speech from the Senate floor, Sen Wyden said that the changes to Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure amounted to "one of the biggest mistakes in surveillance policy in years."

A widely expected legal challenge has been filed by an Irish privacy advocacy group to an European Union-US commercial data transfer pact underpinning billions of dollars of trade in digital services just two months after it came into force. The EU-US Privacy Shield was agreed earlier in 2016 after the European Union's highest court struck down the previous Safe Harbour agreement over the transfer of Europeans' personal data to the United States, on concerns about intrusive US surveillance. The new agreement gives businesses moving personal data across the Atlantic - from human resources information to people's browsing histories to hotel bookings - an easy way to do so without falling foul of tough EU data transferral rules.

Digital Rights Ireland has challenged the adoption of the Privacy Shield pact by the EU executive in front of the second-highest EU court because it does not contain adequate privacy protections, apparently.

Nov's Senate election in Wisconsin could gain Silicon Valley a key ally in Washington in the high-tech industry's battle against the US government's growing appetite for more access to private data. Democrat Russ Feingold, 63, the only lawmaker to vote against the USA Patriot Act in 2001, leads incumbent Sen Ron Johnson (R-WI) in the state in opinion polls ahead of the Nov. 8 election.

Sen Johnson, 61, rode a wave of support from conservative Tea Party activists to victory six years ago, sweeping Feingold out of office. But polls in 2016 have consistently shown Feingold ahead, although recent surveys show a tighter race. Privacy advocates and former Feingold staffers said they expected Feingold, if returned to office, to be sympathetic to the privacy concerns of technology companies and civil liberties groups on issues such as encryption and domestic spying, at a time when many lawmakers are being pressured to confront security threats from Islamic State and other militant groups.

The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that record companies and music publishers that once formed part of EMI Group Ltd could pursue additional copyright infringement claims in a long-running lawsuit over defunct online music storage firm MP3tunes.

The court also rejected an appeal by MP3tunes founder Michael Robertson, who was ordered to pay $12.2 million after a federal jury in 2014 found him liable for copyright infringement. The rulings marked the latest turn in protracted court battles between the music industry and online content providers. They followed prior copyright litigation that led to the shutdown of another company Robertson founded, MP3.com.

Apparently, in 2015, Yahoo Inc secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming e-mails for specific information provided by US intelligence officials. The company complied with a classified US government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a US Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time. It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an e-mail or an attachment, apparently. Apparently, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.

The European Union aims to spur the roll-out of fast broadband across the 28-nation bloc by relaxing rules that force telecommunication companies to open up their networks to competitors. Under planned reforms of the sector, national telecoms regulators will be required to take into account existing commercial agreements between operators when deciding whether to force them to allow competitors access to their networks. Fostering investment in new fiber-optic networks, to meet rising demand for data services, is a major plank of the European Commission's reform of its 15-year-old telecoms laws. National regulators will also have to weigh up the range of retail choices available to users to ensure that regulation is not more of a burden than necessary on operators' decisions to invest.

The costs of running optic fiber - which can deliver speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second - into households are high. Telecoms operators such as Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia have long complained that the current rules forcing them to open up their networks to competitors at regulated prices do not allow them get a decent return on investment. According to the Commission's figures, 68 percent of homes in the EU have access to broadband with speeds of at least 30 megabits per second. Malta, Belgium and the Netherlands have the highest coverage while Italy, France and Greece have the lowest. National regulators will be required to monitor the network investment decisions of operators and will have the power to sanction them if they deviate from their declared intentions without justification, the document says. The aim is to protect operators who lay fast broadband networks first in areas where there is little financial incentive, such as rural areas, and where the arrival of a second operator would undermine the first's business case. The Commission, the EU's executive body, will also seek to encourage operators to co-invest in shared rollouts of fiber-to-the-home by offering them lighter access rules in return.