Stories from Abroad

Internet connectivity continues to speed ahead for people around the world, especially as countries prioritize and improve mobile and fixed broadband networks. The improvement of global median download speeds has been somewhat asymmetrical over the past year on the Speedtest Global Index. Fixed broadband speeds made greater strides over the past year than mobile download speeds, with fixed broadband speeds becoming at least 28% faster and mobile becoming nearly 17% faster from November 2021 to November 2022.

Canada’s competition tribunal approved Rogers Communications’ CAD 20 billion ($14.77 billion) bid for rival operator Shaw Communications.

The Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced the conclusion of two inquiries into the data processing operations of Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (“Meta Ireland”) in connection with the delivery of its Facebook and Instagram services.

Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform. Behind the scenes, however, the company provided direct approval and internal protection to the US military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes US government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.

Iran’s government has throttled down bandwidths, stepped up filtering of social-media sites and taken down virtual private networks, according to analysts and reports by nongovernment organizations. It has also sought to intercept Starlink and other satellite internet devices, which are illegal in Iran. The number of Iranians with access to Starlink is a tiny fraction of the millions who use virtual private networks and other platforms to evade government restrictions, users say.

France’s privacy watchdog fined Microsoft for not making it easy enough for users of its Bing search engine to reject cookies used for online ads, as part of a broader increase of enforcing Europe’s privacy laws. France’s data-protection regulator, the CNIL, fined a Microsoft subsidiary in Ireland 60 million euros, equivalent to almost $64 million. The company hadn’t—until earlier in 2022—offered users the option to reject so-called cookies alongside the button to accept them, the regulator said.

The European Commission has made commitments offered by Amazon legally binding under European Union antitrust rules. Amazon's commitments address the Commission's competition concerns over Amazon's use of non-public marketplace seller data and over a possible bias in granting sellers access to its Buy Box and its Prime program. Amazon's practices raised three competition concerns:

Microsoft and Viasat announced a new partnership to help deliver internet access to 10 million people around the globe, including 5 million across Africa.

Ofcom has today launched an industry-wide enforcement programme into whether in-contract price rises were set out clearly enough by phone and broadband companies before customers signed up.

China’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration, instructed tech companies to expand censorship of protests and moved to curb access to virtual private networks, as a government clampdown succeeds in keeping most protesters off the streets after