Facebook should abandon revived plans to launch a digital currency (see 1910220059), Democrats wrote CEO Mark Zuckerberg Tuesday. Sens. Brian Schatz, Hawaii; Sherrod Brown, Ohio; Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut; Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts; and Tina Smith, Minnesota, signed. Citing the recent controversy over internal research about teen mental health (see 2110050062), they asked Zuckerberg to abandon plans for its pilot digital wallet Novi, announced Tuesday, and to agree not to bring its digital currency Diem to the market. “Facebook cannot be trusted to manage a payment system or digital currency when its existing ability to manage risks and keep consumers safe has proven wholly insufficient,” they wrote. A Novi spokesperson said the company looks forward to responding to the letter.

A Massachusetts legislative committee's sudden delay of testimony on a possible digital ad tax caused some confusion Monday. The Joint Revenue Committee was originally scheduled to consider H-3081 at a virtual hearing that day. Bill sponsor Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven (D) testified on the bill, but House Chair Mark Cusick (D) then told her it wasn’t on the agenda. The tax bill “was removed from the agenda for today's hearing by mutual agreement of the Chairs ... because the Committee has other bills like this bill and have decided to hear them together at a future hearing,” Cusick’s Chief of Staff Ryan Sterling emailed us. Senate Chair Adam Hinds' (D) Chief of Staff Steve Maher told us “the bill was added by mistake to today's hearing and was removed once the error was noticed.” Chairs typically agree on a set of bills to be heard, and since H-3081 wasn't discussed "it was removed to be heard at a later date,” he emailed.

Tech companies responded to a June Southern Co. report warning of the threat from low-power indoor unlicensed devices to electric utility operations in the 6 GHz band (see 2106240075). The companies said an August letter “attempting to rehabilitate its flawed test report. … not only failed to resolve the problems with the testing, but also doubled down on some of the … report’s most questionable aspects.” Southern’s testing shows why the FCC’s approach in the 6 GHz order “was correct, and in fact very conservative, for avoiding a significant risk of harmful interference to incumbent operations from low-power indoor operations,” tech companies said. The filing by Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, Facebook, Google and other companies was posted Friday in docket 18-295. Southern didn’t comment.

Brightcove is buying HapYak technology and marketing assets from K-12 instructional content platform Newsela, it said Thursday. The tech will let Brightcove users incorporate interactivity into video, including clickable hot spots, quizzes, shopping cart purchases, personalization, choose-your-own adventure paths, and various calls to action, such as buy now or subscribe, it said. The deal is expected to close in Q4.

Wi-Fi 6, now about 2 years old, should start getting wide adoption among ISPs starting by year's end, with it becoming relatively commonplace in households toward Q2, said Patrick Moreno, Zyxel Communications product marketing manager, during a webinar Thursday. He said many providers remain "in the discovery phase" about Wi-Fi 6. He said the latest generation of Wi-Fi has speeds 30% to 40% faster than Wi-Fi 5 and increased capacity for more connected devices, plus lower latency for time-sensitive applications. He said Wi-Fi 6 routers will be backward compatible for Wi-Fi 4 and 5. A variation -- Wi-Fi 6E, which came out earlier this year -- adds the 6 GHz band, which will help alleviate congestion in the crowded 2.4 GHz band and the starting-to-crowd 5 GHz band, Moreno said. He said 6E gateways and extenders are in development.

Texas’ motion to extend the timeline for responding to a lawsuit over the state’s social media law (see 2109220064) is a “delay tactic” meant to block the court’s ability to rule on constitutionality before its effective date, said the Computer & Communications Industry Association and NetChoice in a filing (also see here) Wednesday in docket 1:21-cv-00840. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a motion for a 60-day extension, two weeks after the new law’s Dec. 2 effective date. The associations said granting the motion would lead to “unnecessary and overly burdensome ‘expedited’ discovery” that would intrude into “constitutionally protected editorial practices.” Paxton’s office didn’t comment.

U.S. Roku monthly active users will increase 11.5% this year to 111.7 million, with growth slowing in 2022 as the market becomes more saturated, eMarketer forecast. Amazon Fire TV is “catching up,” with 15.4% growth projected for 2021, reaching 97 million monthly active users, the report said Tuesday. Roku has 51.7% of connected TV users vs. Amazon’s 45% and Apple TV's 13.1% penetration, it said, accounting for customers with multiple services.

Augmented reality will leverage AI to “engage” 200 million active users by 2026, reported ABI Research Wednesday. It expects nearly 20 million pairs of AR smart glasses with “local on-device” AI chipsets will ship in 2026, for 70% of total smart glasses shipments that year. “Many companies in the AR space have been leveraging AI in numerous ways for years, and this usage is growing both in number of companies and scope of usage,” said ABI. This bodes well for AI becoming “a valuable enabling technology that is harmonious with the entire augmented reality value chain,” it said. “The combination of AI, machine learning and AR is an incredibly potent one.”

T-Mobile said Tuesday it’s cutting the prices of its home internet offering by $10 monthly to $50. T-Mobile said it’s targeting “bogus charges” tacked on by wireline ISPs each month, which it claims cost Americans $9 billion last year.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had widespread outages Monday. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook tweeted at 12:22 p.m. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” Instagram noted the platform is “having a little bit of a hard time right now.” WhatsApp said it was “working to get things back to normal.” The outages began around 11:45 a.m. EDT and continued for several hours. Network analytics company Kentik said “initial indications” suggest this came from a domain name system issue. Traffic to Facebook “virtually disappeared” at 11:39 a.m. Monday, said Kentik. AT&T, T-Mobile, Xfinity and Verizon also had spikes in service outages reported in the same time frame as the Facebook outage, per Downdetector data. “Facebook and Instagram had an outage today” and “some folks were trying to connect the dots,” emailed a Verizon spokesperson: “Our network is fully functioning.” The broader Facebook outage is affecting access to some apps, but T-Mobile’s network isn’t experiencing service issues, a spokesperson said.