TiVo’s patent infringement settlement with Verizon cuts short a trial set of November and increases the pressure on Google’s Motorola Mobility and Time Warner Cable to reach a similar accord, analysts said.

Restrictions on Internet freedom continue to grow -- and the threats against it are shifting, said human rights group Freedom House’s 2012 report on worldwide Internet freedom. The report said Estonia had the most Internet freedom in the past year, followed by the U.S. and Germany. Iran was found to have the least online freedom, followed by Cuba, China and Syria. The report, released Monday, assessed events and shifts in the Internet freedom situation in 47 countries between January 2011 and May 2012. Researchers evaluated the situation in each country and assigned a numerical score, with 100 being the worst possible score. Estonia scored 10, while Iran scored 90; the U.S. scored 12, according to Freedom House (http://xrl.us/bnq8xh).The more repressive governments on the list continue to use traditional censorship methods like filtering and blocking content, but they are now supplementing those with “nuanced” tactics, Sanja Kelly, the report’s lead author, said at a Freedom House event Monday. Governments are increasingly engaging in proactive manipulation of online content, including hiring pro-government bloggers to attack anti-government bloggers’ credibility and paying people to bombard anti-government blogs with false information, she said. That tactic had previously only been found in Russia and China, but has now spread into countries like Iran and Belarus, said Freedom House. The report said 19 of the 47 assessed countries had passed new laws impacting Internet freedom since January 2011. Those have included a new law in Malaysia that holds intermediaries like ISPs responsible for “seditious” comments users post online, Kelly said. “As a consequence, in some of the environments we've seen some of the intermediaries almost voluntarily taking down the content they fear will get them into trouble."

Broadband ISPs excoriated the FCC for adopting unrealistic standards for its Section 706 report on the state of broadband deployment, in comments filed Thursday and Friday in docket 12-228. In response to a notice of inquiry asking what factors the commission should consider for its ninth report (http://xrl.us/bnqtzn), the telcos and cable companies aired some longstanding grievances about the commission’s findings the last three years that broadband was not being deployed on a “reasonable and timely fashion” (CD Aug 22 p1). States spoke of the need for the commission to tweak its USF rules to enable faster deployment of broadband, and interest groups expressed a need for a faster definition of broadband to enable more data-hungry applications.

The U.S. is negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement under the “presumption that data should move,” said Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Telecom and Electronic Commerce Policy Jonathan McHale. “There’s some protectionist challenges we have to meet.” He cited governments that demand that data storage companies locate their servers in those countries to sell products and services to their citizens. In many cases, these kinds of protectionist policies can harm not just American companies, but also foreign users, he said at an event at George Washington University on Friday: “There really is a strong understanding that all the commercial entities in these countries and the consumers benefit” from having a free flow of information across borders.

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission (CITEL) agreed with the U.S. earlier this month on many core components of how the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) should be revised at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications, Terry Kramer, head of the U.S.’s WCIT delegation, said Friday. CITEL met in San Salvador, El Salvador, to determine its position ahead of WCIT, which begins Dec. 3 in Dubai. The U.S. delegation has been meeting with regional groups like CITEL and other ITU member nations to get them to adopt the U.S.’s position on the ITRs, which it outlined in formal documents filed with WCIT in early August (CD Aug 6 p2). The U.S. is likely to file an updated set of documents on its position in mid-November, Kramer said.

The advent of online content is causing the media industry and policymakers to assess whether there is a need for regulation in that space, some media professionals said Friday on Capitol Hill at an event hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee. So far, programming through the Internet is flourishing amid discussions around proposed and existing regulations like the FCC program access rules and the Video Privacy Protection Act, they said.

Granting Nagra USA’s request for a waiver from FCC set-top box rules (CD Sept 4 p5) could lead to a “Balkanization of home network interfaces that would further frustrate competition and also undercut common reliance on CableCARDs,” CEA said in comments on the requests. “CEA has opposed and will continue to oppose any waiver request that would undermine CableCARD common reliance unless and until an IP-based successor interface that is nationally standard and is nationally portable is referenced in FCC regulations,” it said (http://xrl.us/bnqtix). Nagra sought waivers from requirements that cable boxes include a CableCARD slot and an HDMI or DVI output.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced the Internet Radio Fairness Act Friday, aimed at aligning the differing broadcast platform royalty payments under the same standard used to establish rates for cable and satellite radio services. The bipartisan, bicameral bills would level the playing field for Internet radio services by placing them under the Copyright Act 801(b) standard. The bill was backed by an array of technology and broadcasting groups but panned by some musician coalitions. It is unlikely that the bill will receive a floor vote in either the House or Senate when lawmakers return to the Hill after the November elections.

FCC and industry officials gathered Friday to discuss adding mobile measurements to its two-year-old broadband measurement program. “It remains difficult for consumers to get detailed information about their mobile broadband performance,” said FCC attorney Daniel Kirschner. After releasing two “Measuring Broadband America” reports and being on track to release a third later this year, the FCC will look into measuring mobile broadband performance, as proposed in the National Broadband Plan. For the first time, U.S. consumers will have information about mobile networks, which have become an “integral” part of consumers’ daily lives, Kirschner said.

The Democrats and Republicans agree on most fundamental aspects of Internet policy, industry policy experts said Thursday night at an Internet Society event hosted by Google’s Washington office. That lack of fundamental disagreement has mostly kept Internet issues on the backburner over the course of the parties’ 2012 campaigns for president and Congress, even though Internet issues continue to infiltrate other areas of national policy, they said. The Internet Society had intended to bring in surrogates from the campaigns of President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, but eventually decided to bring in former members of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations to articulate their parties’ positions, said Georgetown University professor and panel moderator Michael Nelson. None of the panelists were speaking on behalf of the Obama or Romney campaigns, he said.