Every school district-issued device should comply with internet safety policies that prevent students from accessing pornography and other obscene material, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr and Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee ranking member Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., wrote Monday in The Hill. Their opinion piece follows a joint letter Carr and Blackburn sent last week to the Universal Service Administrative Co., the organization that administers the FCC’s E-Rate and the Emergency Connectivity Fund programs and ensures school-issued devices comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act. “While some districts are exercising diligence with tech usage, others are taking a far too reckless approach to student safety,” they wrote in the opinion piece. Districts should be able to control access to harmful materials on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, they said.

Public comments are due Nov. 18 on how “children are affected by digital advertising and marketing messages that may blur the line between ads and entertainment,” the FTC said Tuesday. The comment solicitation is part of an agency effort that includes an Oct. 19 event on online safety for children (see 2205190058). The FTC declined to extend the public comment period for a proposed rule “that would ban junk fees and bait-and-switch advertising tactics that can plague consumers throughout the car-buying experience.” The commission voted 5-0 to keep the Sept. 22 deadline, saying stakeholders argued in favor of both extending and declining the extension. The public will have had 80 days to review the proposed rule at deadline, the agency said.

Bill.com estimates 400,000 businesses, many of them single-proprietor enterprises, used its electronic payment services in fiscal 2022 ended June 30, a threefold increase year over year, said CEO Rene Lacerte on a fiscal Q4 earnings call Thursday. But toward the end of the fourth quarter, “we started to see signals of the macro environment impacting spend patterns, especially in discretionary categories like advertising,” he said. Bill.com began in June to see its total payment volume growth rates “moderate,” said Chief Financial Officer John Rettig. “This trend continued into July and early August,” he said. “While it appears that the macro environment is influencing business spend, we continue to see very strong customer acquisition, engagement and retention.” The current macro environment “presents numerous near-term uncertainties,” said Rettig. “Our fiscal 2023 outlook anticipates customers will continue to react to the external factors and temper spend throughout the year, similar to the trends we saw emerging in late Q4 and early this quarter.” Bill.com believes “there is a significant greenfield opportunity ahead of us to help millions of businesses manage their cash flows, and transform their financial operations,” said Rettig. Its total addressable market (TAM) includes more than 30 million small businesses in the U.S. and 70 million globally, the majority of which “still use manual paper-based processes,” said CEO Lacerte. “Our TAM is significant.”

Comments on the FTC’s potential privacy rulemaking (see 2208110068) are due Oct. 21, said a notice for Monday's Federal Register. The agency is seeking public comment "on the prevalence of commercial surveillance and data security practices that harm consumers," said the notice.

The stay in the tech industry’s lawsuit against Florida’s social media law is extended until at least Sept. 21, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday in docket 21-12355 (see 2206240052. The stay will remain in force until “final disposition” by the Supreme Court, provided the case remains active, said a notice from the 11th Circuit.

Comments are due Sept. 29 for the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s second draft of its AI risk management framework (see 2201270058), NIST announced Thursday. The framework provides voluntary guidance for addressing “risks in the design, development, use, and evaluation of AI products, services, and systems,” the agency said.

Australia’s High Court correctly acknowledged that facilitating access to online content shouldn't “give rise to liability” for the facilitator, Public Knowledge said Wednesday. The High Court ruled Wednesday in Google v. Defteros that Google isn’t a publisher of sites it links. A “hyperlink is merely a tool which enables a person to navigate to another webpage,” the High Court wrote, overturning a Supreme Court of Victoria ruling saying Google is a publisher for linking news articles. The decision “provides additional strength for promoting a free and open internet where a diversity of views can flourish,” PK Government Affairs Director Greg Guice said. PK noted the concurring opinion raised an “interesting issue” on whether protection should be extended to paid content between Google and third parties. PK has “argued that such business dealings should be outside the scope of Section 230 protections because when the parties promoting content have a financial incentive to amplify the number of people who view said content, these parties should also have an incentive to more carefully examine the content they are promoting,” said Guice.

Despite ongoing global economic challenges and slower internet traffic growth, Akamai finished Q2 with revenue of $903 million, up 6% year over year and 9% higher in “constant currency,” said CEO Tom Leighton on a Tuesday earnings call. Q2 revenue in Akamai’s content delivery business declined 11% year over year to $417 million in results that were “clearly impacted by a continued deceleration in traffic growth among our largest media customers,” he said. “Like many companies, we're managing through a time of substantial economic headwinds and uncertainty with escalating inflation, the strengthening U.S. dollar, growing concerns about a global recession, escalating geopolitical tensions and conflicts and a slowing of internet traffic growth as the world tries to return to normal in the midst of a pandemic,” said Leighton.

Meta defended its cooperation with law enforcement over data Nebraska police are using to charge a mother and her teenage daughter for the teen’s abortion in April. Jessica Burgess and her 17-year-old daughter, Celeste, were reportedly charged in June after the mother helped the daughter abort, burn and bury a fetus. Celeste was reportedly 23 weeks pregnant at the time of the abortion, and state law, which has remained unchanged since the Roe v. Wade reversal, prohibits abortion after 20 weeks. The Norfolk Police Department, using a search warrant, obtained direct Facebook messages between the two about the use of abortion pills. Legislators and privacy advocates have raised concerns about law enforcement using digital data against individuals seeking abortion (see 2207220053). Much of the reporting in the case is “plain wrong,” Meta said in a statement Tuesday: The company received valid legal warrants June 7, prior to the Supreme Court decision. The warrants didn’t mention “abortion at all,” the company said. “Court documents indicate that police were at that time investigating the alleged illegal burning and burial of a stillborn infant. The warrants were accompanied by non-disclosure orders, which prevented us from sharing information about them. The orders have now been lifted.”

A proposal from the top Republican on the House Commerce Committee to add technologists, psychologists and youth development experts to the FTC is “one of the best ideas in the modern tech debate that has received way too little attention,” Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said Tuesday. Bedoya is “thrilled” the proposal from House Commerce Committee ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., was included in the committee’s bipartisan privacy bill, the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (HR-8152) (see 2207200061). Speaking at the National Association of Attorneys General Presidential Summit, Bedoya said he, Commissioner Christine Wilson and the rest of the commission are studying legislation and “looking at other constructive steps we can take to advance research, heighten awareness, and protect children online.” Bedoya expressed interest in protections against online scams in “all languages” and protections for geolocation data. Any company that uses location data “should think hard about how to better protect their users,” he said. Bedoya said he will ask companies whether the data collection is necessary, how the data is being used and what more can be done to protect it.