Amazon Web Services completed its first 16 AWS Local Zones in the U.S. and plans to launch in 32 new metropolitan areas in 26 countries, it said Wednesday. Local Zones are an “infrastructure deployment” putting compute, storage, database and other services at the edge of the cloud near large population, industry and information technology centers. They allow customers to use AWS services locally while connecting to the rest of their workloads running in AWS regions with “the same elasticity, pay-as-you-go model, application programming interfaces and toolsets," it said. Customers with applications that require ultra-low latency, such as remote real-time gaming, media and entertainment content creation, live video streaming, engineering simulations, augmented and virtual reality and machine learning inference at the edge want AWS infrastructure “closer to their end users to support a seamless experience,” it said. Customers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., and Seattle can use Local Zones to deliver applications requiring “single-digit millisecond latency,” AWS said. The company is rolling it out to metro areas in other parts of the world over the next two years so that customers can meet data residency requirements in regulated sectors like health care and life sciences, financial services and government, it said. AWS manages and supports Local Zones; customers won’t have to incur the expense and effort of procuring, operating, and maintaining infrastructure to support low-latency applications, it said.

The global cellular IoT market will reach $61 billion in value by 2026, rising from $31 billion in 2022, with the growth of 5G and cellular low-power wide area (LPWA) technologies the key drivers, reported Juniper Research Tuesday. LPWA solutions such as narrowband IoT will be the fastest-growing cellular IoT technologies within the forecast period, with LPWA connections expected to grow 1,200%, said Juniper. 5G IoT services will generate $9 billion in global revenue by 2026, rising from $800 million in 2021, it said: That's "growth of 1,000% over the next five years as 5G coverage expands and operators benefit from the increased number of 5G IoT connections.”

Facebook has been storing biometric data from user photos and videos without informed consent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said Monday in a lawsuit against the company. Facebook “exploited the personal information of users and non-users alike to grow its empire and reap historic windfall profits,” Paxton’s office said in a filing with the district court in Harrison County. “The company repeatedly captured biometric identifiers without consent billions of times” in violation of state law, the office said. Paxton has actively pursued legal action against Big Tech (see 2010200058 and 2012160059). A Meta spokesperson emailed: "These claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”

Two California VoIP providers must turn over information the FTC is seeking in investigations about potentially illegal robocalls, the agency announced Monday. The companies can be held in contempt if they don’t comply. The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ordered XCastLabs to comply with a civil investigative demand (CID), but the company delivered only a “small fraction of the required information” in February, the FTC said. A federal judge is compelling compliance. The U.S. District Court in San Diego ordered the production of similar information from Deltracon, based on a CID issued in January. Deltracon has since turned over the required information, the FTC said. XCastLabs complied with the court’s order and has been “been fully responsive” to the FTC’s CID, a spokesperson emailed. The agency sought documents the company doesn’t possess, XCastLabs said, noting it’s not a call center or wireless carrier. Deltracon didn’t comment.

Google has an advertising technology stranglehold over publishers, the European Publishers Council (EPC) said in an antitrust complaint filed Friday with the European Commission. Since it acquired DoubleClick in 2008, Google "has embarked on a barrage of unlawful tactics to foreclose competition in ad tech" and has now achieved "end-to-end control of the ad tech value chain," with market share as high as 90%-100% in segments of the chain. Google's ad tech suite is "rife with conflicts of interest" since it represents the buyer and seller in the same transaction while also running the auction house in the middle and selling its own inventory, EPC said. Google's monopolistic conduct "actively depressed publisher revenue" by, for example, preventing publishers from pitting their ad exchange partners against each other to encourage price competition. Lower advertising revenue means press publishers have fewer resources to invest in news content, EPC said. Google said it hasn't seen the complaint in detail but has been working with the EC and industry for many months. Online advertising "has enabled millions of small businesses to afford advertising for the first time, and for news publishers big and small, it's created new opportunities and substantial new revenue streams that did not exist in the print age," a Google spokesperson emailed. On average, news publishers keep over 95% of the digital advertising revenue they generate when they use Google Ad Manager to show ads on their websites, she added.

The Senate Judiciary Committee should oppose the Earn It Act because it will result in censorship and jeopardize encryption, more than 60 groups wrote the committee Wednesday. The legislation is to be voted on Thursday (see 2202040052). Signers included Center for Democracy & Technology, Public Knowledge, Access Now, American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press Action, Internet Society, Media Alliance and TechFreedom. The increased liability envisioned in the bill “will threaten our ability to speak freely and securely online, and threaten the very prosecutions the bill seeks to enable,” they wrote. Eleven industry groups also wrote in opposition to the bill. S.3538 would “impair lawful speech and conduct, threaten the privacy of law-abiding citizens, hinder law enforcement’s efforts against online child exploitation, and limit innovation,” they wrote. CTA, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, ACT | The App Association, Engine, NetChoice and the Software & Information Industry Association signed.

President Joe Biden accepted the resignation Monday of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Eric Lander after an administration investigation found he had violated the Biden administration’s workplace policy by bullying of now-former OSTP General Counsel Rachel Wallace and disrespectful interactions with other staff. It “is clear that things I said, and the way I said them, crossed the line at times into being disrespectful and demeaning, to both men and women,” Lander said. “That was never my intention.” He plans to leave “no later than” Feb. 18 “in order to permit an orderly transfer.”

Liquid Avatar Technologies and Game Credits launched the Multiverse Collective, an alliance designed to let independent metaverses share technical, business and marketing resources to create value among members. The companies’ Aftermath Islands Metaverse and Genesis Worlds companies are each building a metaverse in an interoperable environment, they said Monday. The collaboration includes joint development, marketing, authentication of users, verifiable credentials, and community engagement throughout the life cycle of each metaverse, “ensuring that users will be able to engage in a shared safe and secure experience,” the companies said. Working together early in the development process allows both metaverses, and future partners of the Multiverse Collective, to ensure their virtual spaces work together to create a “seamless experience” for users, said Genesis Worlds CEO Jason Cassidy. “Doing this from the beginning makes it much easier than attempting to add interoperability several years down the road when much of the technical plumbing has already been set up,” he said. Principles include fair game play among players, promotion of good actor strategies and creating open standards to support the build and technology stacks of members.

A quarter of the world’s population by 2026 will spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse for work, shopping, education and entertainment, predicted Gartner Monday. It defines a metaverse as a “collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality,” it said. “Vendors are already building ways for users to replicate their lives in digital worlds,” said Gartner. “Eventually, they will take place in a single environment -- the metaverse -- with multiple destinations across technologies and experiences.” No single vendor will own the metaverse, so Gartner expects it “to have a virtual economy enabled by digital currencies and nonfungible tokens,” it said. “The metaverse will impact every business that consumers interact with every day,” but adoption of metaverse technologies is “nascent and fragmented,” and it’s still too early to know “which investments will be viable in the long term,” it said.

Mobile in-app revenue will be 56% of the global digital advertising spend by 2026, when the market is projected to grow to $753 billion globally from $407 billion in 2022, reported Juniper Research Monday. It anticipates desktop PC advertising spend will increase $142 billion in 2026 from $97 billion this year, “despite a diversion of spend towards handheld devices and the implementation of data protection regulation impacting cookie policies.” Video ad spend is expected to grow 63% over the next four years, “as the success of popular distribution channels, such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts, continues to drive demand for video advertising and justify premium charges,” said Juniper.