The U.S. joined more than 60 countries in a shared commitment to an open, inclusive, interoperable internet that respects basic human rights, they said Thursday. The Declaration for the Future of the Internet is a response to “rising digital authoritarianism” in countries like Russia and China, White House officials said during a press call Wednesday, citing repression of freedom of expression, news censorship, election interference and disinformation. The EU, Ukraine, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Australia were among those endorsing the declaration. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo praised the declaration and applauded President Joe Biden’s goal of connecting “every single American to high-speed internet.” The declaration is “a timely opportunity to recommit to a shared vision of the global Internet as an open platform for opportunity, innovation, and understanding,” said NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson. Computer and Communications Industry Association President Matt Schruers said “a collaborative approach among like-minded democratic countries is needed to combat growing government threats to the open Internet,” and the tech sector is ready for partnership. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation raised concerns about opening the door for the EU to export its “innovation-limiting policy regime.” The declaration “should be scaled back considerably to address what are principally cross-border issues, such as cybersecurity, cross-border data flows and data localization,” as well as a commitment to trustworthy infrastructure and nondiscrimination, said Senior Policy Analyst Ashley Johnson.

Sierra Wireless announced a new partnership with Orange Wholesale France to bolster its access to global networks and expand connectivity coverage across Europe. Access to a wide range of radio technologies, including low-power wide-area and LTE networks, “allows customers with the new offer to enable a variety of use cases regardless of data usage,” said Sierra Tuesday.

Market share of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E will reach 58% this year, passing Wi-Fi 5, said TrendForce Wednesday. Wi-Fi 6E, which supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands and can also operate in the 6 GHz band, is designed to reduce network congestion and interference through more numerous, wider and non-overlapping channels, said the research firm. More automotive, IoT and AR/VR tech is expected to enter the consumer market this year, creating additional demand for high-quality Wi-Fi, while smart home and smart lighting are among the fastest growing consumer segments, it said. Shipments of Wi-Fi-based smart home gear are forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18% from 2021 to 2026, driving applications including AR/VR, cloud gaming, 4K videoconferencing and 8K streaming media, it said. By 2025, the share of smartphones supporting Wi-Fi 6 and 6E is estimated to exceed 80%.

Boeing is migrating applications out of on-premises data centers to Amazon Web Services to “drive product innovation, more efficient operations, and improved customer support,” the companies said Wednesday. Beyond the cloud relationship, Amazon Air has grown its fleet to more than 110 Boeing aircraft, they said.

Boingo will bring wireless connectivity to the Las Vegas Monorail’s Convention Center Station, where it will open a new “innovation hub” in 2022's second half, said the carrier Wednesday. The hub will be a “launch pad” to test and demonstrate 5G, Wi-Fi 6/6E, Wi-Fi 7 and IoT pilot programs, plus “use cases like instant sports betting at live events,” it said.

The invasion of Ukraine challenges the concept of multistakeholder internet infrastructure governance, said representatives from ICANN, academia, the European Parliament, civil society, security organizations and others. At such pivotal times, "we must decide as a community whether Internet self-governance has matured sufficiently to address such newly encountered issues." Governments have historically imposed sanctions but the global Internet community hasn't developed a process for doing so, they said. Principles they set out Thursday for sanctions include: (1) Don't disconnect a country's population from the internet because that hampers access to information that might lead people to withdraw support for acts of war. (2) Make sanctions focused and precise, and minimize the possibility of unintended consequences. (3) Military and propaganda agencies are potential targets of sanctions. (4) While it's inappropriate for governments to try to compel internet governance mechanisms to impose sanctions outside the multistakeholder process, there are some effective and specific sanctions that could be considered. Signers backed forming of a "new, minimal, multistakeholder mechanism ... which after due process and consensus would publish sanctioned IP addresses and domain names in the form of public data feeds ... to be consumed by any organization that chooses to subscribe to the principles and their outcome." They urged the community to launch a dialogue on a mechanism to decide whether the IP addresses and domains of the Russian military and its propaganda arms should be sanctioned. After analyzing Ukraine's requests for various ICANN actions (see [2203020002), they concluded that blocklisting is the most effective solution.

Two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “we don't know how this evolves going forward, and it's really too early to tell what the overall impact of this on our business will be,” Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal told a Morgan Stanley investment conference Thursday. “In this moment that reminds us why public conversation is important in the world,” said Agrawal: “It gives us this opportunity to showcase the value of Twitter to all of these people, but it also has us feel this immense responsibility.” Twitter has been “doing work proactively to be prepared for this moment” for years, he said. In 2019, it banned all ads from “state-affiliated media organizations,” and two years ago it started “labeling and de-amplifying all state-affiliated media entities,” he said: “We've been very, very transparent about any attempt that we've seen from state actors to manipulate the conversation on Twitter.” Former Chief Technology Officer Agrawal took over as Twitter CEO in November after Jack Dorsey abruptly left the company (see 2111290038).

Global revenue in the enterprise segment of the wireless local area network market grew 21.8% in Q4 to $2.3 billion and was up 20.4% for full-year 2021 to $7.6 billion, fueled by growing Wi-Fi 6 adoption, reported IDC Wednesday. The consumer segment of the WLAN market declined 10.1% year over year in Q4 and was down 2.5% for the full year, it said. The decline in the “consumer-class” WLAN market was largely due to difficult comparisons with the strong results in 2020, when consumers upgraded their wireless connectivity in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, said IDC. Compared with full-year 2019 before the pandemic, the consumer market grew 12.6% in 2021, “indicating that the market's fundamentals remain strong,” it said. Wi-Fi 6 products continued to grow in the consumer market, generating 28.2% of the segment's revenue and 13.1% of its unit shipments, it said.

ICANN made $1 million available to help maintain internet access for Ukrainians, it said Monday. The organization earlier refused the Ukraine government's request that it revoke country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) .ru and .su to limit Russian internet access. ICANN "has a longstanding practice of coming to the technical support and aid of technical providers, such as ccTLD managers, to enable them to stay connected to the Internet's DNS [domain name system] and continue servicing their customers and region during times of crisis," a March 6 board resolution said. This time, board members also directed ICANN to provide funding to Ukraine "to support maintaining access to Internet infrastructure through these challenges." The funding runs until year's end. ICANN must work with other organizations on this, President Goran Marby told us at a virtual executive team Q&A at this week's ICANN meeting from San Juan, Puerto Rico: Help could involve satellite terminals, but it's too early to say and so far there has been no request from the Ukraine government. Also Monday, ICANN responded to concerns about domain name registrants in Ukraine being unable to renew their domains in a timely manner. It's considering the events in the region an extenuating circumstance under the 2013 registrar accreditation agreement, meaning registrars can extend renewal periods for people in affected areas. Earlier this month, the Ukrainian government asked ICANN to temporarily or permanently revoke the Russian ccTLDs and shutter DNS servers there (see 2203020002). But in a March 2 reply, Marby said ICANN's primary role with ccTLDs involves validating requests that come from authorized parties within the respective country or territory, and ICANN can't take unilateral actions to disconnect domains: Such a change in ICANN's process "would have devastating and permanent effects on the trust and utility of this global system." In addition, he said, the root server system is made up of many geographically distributed nodes maintained by independent operators. Nor can ICANN control internet access or content, he wrote; it must remain neutral and act in support of the global internet.

Data is an "untapped potential," the European Commission said Wednesday. As part of its European strategy for data, it floated new rules for use of data, saying its volume has grown from 33 zettabytes generated in 2018 to 175 zettabytes expected in 2025. The Data Act will address the legal, economic and technical issues causing its under-usage, the EC said. The rules will make more data available for reuse and are expected to create 270 billion euros ($306 billion) additional GDP by 2028. Proposals include measures to allow users of connected devices to gain access to the data generated by them, often harvested exclusively by manufacturers, and to share it with third parties to provide after-market services such as predictive maintenance; and provisions to rebalance the negotiating power for small and mid-sized enterprises by preventing abuse of contract imbalances in data-sharing agreements. It provides for ways for public sector bodies to access and use data held by the private sector when needed for exceptional circumstances such as public emergencies, and it allows customers to switch between different cloud data-processing services providers while safeguarding against unlawful data transfer. The proposal is "well-intended but in need of improvements," said the Computer & Communications Industry Association. It "will serve the EU's digital ambitions if it protects confidential business information, treats all companies equally, and avoids creating new data flow restrictions," said Public Policy Director Alexandre Roure. The proposal is "essential to consumers," said the European Consumer Organisation: People originate much of the data via their use of connected devices and digital services and must be able to control how and with whom their data is shared.