The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) must be sure of driverless cars’ safety before adopting public use regulations, Consumer Watchdog said in a letter sent Tuesday to the DMV (http://bit.ly/1qp4OuS). “In the ideal rule-making process, regulations covering the public use of autonomous vehicles would not be adopted until they could be informed by the results of testing that was done under DMV regulation,” said the letter, written by Consumer Watchdog Privacy Project Director John Simpson, who has often been critical of Google, which Consumer Watchdog believes is trying to rush its autonomous cars to market. The DMV recently published regulations taking effect Sept. 16 for the testing of autonomous vehicles, Consumer Watchdog said. “Unfortunately the [California] Legislature, under pressure from Google and the tech industry, required in SB-1298 that the regulations for both testing and public use be adopted by Jan. 1, 2015.” Consumer Watchdog said the public use regulations should be delayed until there is at least a year of tests under the regulations going into effect in September. “Under the regulations we are proposing, the earliest time a ‘driverless car’ could be approved for public use on California’s highways would be July 1, 2016."

Global IP traffic will reach an annual run rate of 1.6 zettabytes -- more than 1.5 trillion gigabytes -- by 2018, Cisco said Tuesday. That would be more traffic globally than occurred in all prior “Internet years” combined, Cisco said in a report. There will be 3.9 billion Internet users by 2018 -- more than half the world’s projected population for that year, it said. By then, the average broadband speed will be 42 Mbps, up from an average of 16 Mbps in 2013, Cisco said. Broadband speed increases will drive projected increases in IP video usage, 4K UltraHD connectivity and machine-to-machine connections, the report said. IP video will be 80 percent of all IP traffic in 2018, up from 66 percent in 2013, Cisco said. There will be 2.7 networked devices and connections for every person on Earth by 2018, up from 1.7 per person in 2013, the report said (http://bit.ly/P1eXkv).

European Union data protection laws will apply to non-EU companies doing business in Europe, EU ministers agreed during a Justice Council meeting Friday (http://bit.ly/1jggGun). The decision puts a conclusive end to an issue circulating European courts, where Facebook recently lost an argument that it should be required to comply with the data privacy laws only in the country of its European headquarters, Ireland (http://bit.ly/1m66fMI). “It’s in the interest of companies to have legal certainty rather than having to spend money on costly law suits only to arrive at the same result at the end,” said EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. “Following [Friday’s] agreements, the data protection reform is on track -- it is on the right track.” The decisions are part of the EU’s ongoing attempts to formalize a new set of data privacy rules (CD Oct 23 p14). U.S. companies have also been working to comply with a recent EU Court of Justice ruling that individuals have a “right to be forgotten” and can request search engines remove links to certain information about themselves.

Cybercrime likely costs the global economy more than $445 billion per year, McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies said Monday in a report. The report said the annual global cost could be as low as $375 billion and as high as $575 billion. The U.S. annual loss is around $100 billion, the report said. Those figures are likely to increase in the coming years, amplifying cybercrime’s impact on the global economy, the report said. Global losses from abuse of personal information and related records totals up to $160 billion annually, with about 40 million people in the U.S. -- about 15 percent of the population -- having had their information stolen, the report said. “Governments need to begin serious, systematic effort to collect and publish data on cybercrime to help countries and companies make better choices about risk and policy,” the report said (http://bit.ly/1oNjp21).

Netflix said Monday it plans to end what it calls a “small scale test” on June 16 of certain messages to their subscribers when videos are buffering. The messages faulted ISPs for delays. The company said in a blog post that it plans to “evaluate rolling it out more broadly” (http://nflx.it/1pw0MRk). Verizon, one of the ISPs whose subscribers received the test messages, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Netflix Thursday seeking an end to the messages. Verizon asserted that any network congestion issues were attributable to Netflix choosing overly trafficked connections for its streaming service (CD June 6 p4). Netflix said in its blog post Monday it “does not purposely select congested routes” and that the issue is “at that door -- the interconnection point -- when the broadband provider hasn’t provided enough capacity to accommodate the traffic their customer requested.” Verizon had no comment. Netflix also released its ISP speed index for May, in which it lowered the rankings for both Verizon’s FiOS and DSL services, as well as Comcast’s service. Comcast ranked No. 5 on the index for May -- down from No. 3 in April -- with an average speed of 2.72 Mbps. Verizon FiOS dropped two places to No. 10 with an average of 1.9 Mbps, while Verizon DSL dropped one spot to No. 16 with an average of 1.05 Mbps. Charter, Windstream, Frontier and Clearwire all moved up in the rankings. Cablevision’s Optimum service remained No. 1 with an average of 3.03 Mbps.

Netflix leads use cases for connected TVs, said research from Leichtman Research Group released Friday that showed that 49 percent of Netflix subscribers surveyed said they streamed video weekly from the Internet via a video game or Blu-ray player, smart TV or streaming media box, compared with 8 percent of non-Netflix subscribers. For Netflix subscribers, that’s up from 38 percent in 2012 and 24 percent in 2010, Leichtman said. Some 49 percent of U.S. households have at least one TV connected to the Internet, with 24 percent of adults watching video from the Internet using a connected TV at least once a week, compared to 13 percent two years ago, and 5 percent in 2010, it said. Netflix streaming video users have remained consistent on TV usage, with roughly three-fourth of respondents saying they watch Netflix on a TV. The number of Netflix members that subscribe to another pay TV service has slipped to 80 percent from 85 percent in 2012 and from 88 percent in 2010, Leichtman said. The number of households that don’t have a pay TV service but get Netflix is now 48 percent, up from 29 percent in 2012 and 16 percent in 2010, it said. Fifteen percent of Netflix subscribers share their subscriptions with others outside of the household, Leichtman said. Thirty-one percent of adults watch video daily on non-TV devices including home computers, mobile phones, iPads and tablets, Leichtman said, while 58 percent do so on a weekly basis, up from 18 percent daily and 46 percent weekly two years ago, it said. Some 34 percent of households watch any form of over-the-top video -- including connected TVs and other devices -- daily and 61 percent weekly, it said. The data is based on a telephone survey in April with 1,211 adults age 18 and older from throughout the continental U.S. The random sample of respondents was distributed and weighted to best reflect the demographic and geographic make-up of the U.S., Leichtman said, and has a statistical margin of error of +/- 2.8 percent.

The BBC will run a series of Ultra HD trials during three World Cup matches, including the finals July 13 at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio, it said Thursday. “These will be closed trials exploring the latest distribution technologies over traditional broadcast and consumer broadband networks, allowing us to better understand how any Ultra HD TV service could be delivered to the home,” said a BBC spokesman. “This will be the first time live Ultra HD content will be broadcast simultaneously” over broadband and traditional broadcast networks, he said. The live streams will be transported from Brazil by satellite to the U.K., “where they will be decoded and distributed, via existing broadcast and super-fast broadband infrastructure, to a number of compatible consumer UHD TV sets in selected R&D facilities,” the BBC said. “The aim is to better understand the latest UHD distribution technologies and standards in a live outside broadcast, helping to inform future development, best practices and, ultimately, to ensure any future UHD TV services can make a real impact when they launch.” The trial also will “examine the use” of High Efficiency Video Coding compression for distribution over traditional broadcast and over the top IP networks, it said.

While 68 percent of service providers think customers use social media for customer service because they're unable to reach a service representative by phone, 50 percent of consumers use social media because they prefer that outlet, said research released Wednesday by Amdocs, which provides consumer care services for telecom carriers and ISPs (http://yhoo.it/S9gTIt). Companies aren’t responding to customers who reach out on social media, the survey found. Three quarters of those who reach out on social media never get a response. Amdocs commissioned Ovum to survey 100 global service provider executives and commissioned Coleman Parkes Research to survey 4,068 global customers in January.

Pandora remains focused on the U.S., where it continues to see a “huge opportunity for growth,” CEO Brian McAndrews told a stockholders meeting webcast from Oakland Wednesday. The company is “considering other countries over time,” said McAndrews. But “there are challenges to be worked out in terms of figuring out what are the best countries, the best opportunities and making sure that we figure out what the royalty structures are” there, he said. Europe and other markets are “not an immediate opportunity” for Pandora, just a “long-term” one, he said. Pandora’s service is in Australia and New Zealand. It has more than 1.6 million registered listeners there and also has started selling advertising in those countries, said McAndrews. Pandora has invested some money on marketing, mostly on the Internet, including on search engines, he said. Pandora has about 3.4 million paying subscribers out of about 76 million monthly users that listen, said McAndrews. Pandora users listened to the service for a combined 1.7 billion hours in May, up 28 percent from May 2013, it said in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1nPGdSx). Pandora had a 9.1 percent share of all U.S. radio listening last month, up from 7.3 percent a year ago, it said. Active listeners grew 9 percent to 77 million as of May 31, it said.

Thursday has been designated by activists joined in Reset the Net as a day of advocacy against government surveillance. Activities (https://www.resetthenet.org/) organized by Fight the Future, a partnership of tech companies like Google, Mozilla and Reddit, and advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set for Thursday, the one-year anniversary of the first revelations related to documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Since then, the government has “rebellion on their hands as tech companies and Internet users work together to directly intervene in mass surveillance and block the NSA and its kind from the web,” said Tiffiniy Cheng, spokeswoman for Fight for the Future, in a statement. Snowden also issued a statement through his lawyer (http://bit.ly/1mSEhDC). “We have the technology, and adopting encryption is the first effective step that everyone can take to end mass surveillance,” he said. “Don’t ask for your privacy. Take it back."