Huawei, hit by U.S. and international export sanctions, on Wednesday said Q1 revenue fell 17% year on year to 152.2 billion Chinese yuan ($23.5 billion). It's the second consecutive quarterly drop. "2021 will be another challenging year for us, but it's also the year that our future development strategy will begin to take shape," said Eric Xu, the rotating chairman.

Eutelsat is buying an equity stake in OneWeb, with the geostationary orbit operator saying OneWeb's low earth orbit constellation will open the door to an addressable market beyond its current reach. Eutelsat said Tuesday it should close on its $550 million stake in the second half of the year. Eutelsat said it will use cash on hand and proceeds from the C-band auction for the investment. OneWeb "will become our main growth engine outside our broadcast and broadband applications," Eutelsat CEO Rodolphe Belmer said.

Online fraud will cost e-tailers more than $20 billion in losses globally this year, up from an estimated $17.5 billion in 2020, reported Juniper Research Monday. Bad actors are “exposing insecure fraud mitigation processes from merchants who are unfamiliar and unprepared for the continuing fraud challenges,” it said: Merchants should “do more to implement fraud prevention strategies” across e-commerce channels, or risk continuously bigger losses, it said. Though merchants “will be keen to reduce fraud rates from their current levels, they will be hesitant to introduce extra friction into the checkout process,” the research firm said. "Merchants will need to ensure that extra security checks are justified to the user, or they risk higher cart abandonment,” said analyst Susan Morrow. Juniper forecasts China will generate 40% of e-commerce fraud losses by 2025, due to “a relative lack of fraud detection and prevention.”

Unprecedented demand for semiconductors “stressed supply chains across the industry,” said new Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on a Q1 call Thursday. “We have doubled our internal wafer capacity the last few years, but the industry is now challenged by a shortage of foundry capacity, substrates and components.” It will take “a couple of years for the ecosystem to make the significant investments to address these shortages,” said Gelsinger. The “integrated device manufacturing” plan he announced March 23 is designed to “provide the industry another source of foundry capacity,” he said. “We cannot do it alone,” said Gelsinger. “The investment needed at the scale required is immense, and it will require close industry and government partnership.” Intel is “encouraged” by President Joe Biden’s “recognition of semiconductor manufacturing as a critical component of our national infrastructure,” he said.

Arianespace is to launch 36 OneWeb low earth orbit broadband satellites Monday from Russia's Vostochny Cosmodrome, OneWeb said Thursday. The launch will bring OneWeb's total in-orbit constellation to 182 satellites and is the fifth of its "Five to 50" program to deliver connectivity to regions north of 50 degrees latitude by June, it said. Global service will be available in 2022, it said.

The European Commission's "first-ever" draft rules for AI unveiled Wednesday prompted a mix of praise and criticism. "Trust is a must" for AI, and the rules will spearhead "the development of new global norms to make sure AI can be trusted," said Margrethe Vestager, EC vice president for a Europe fit for the digital age. The rules take a risk-based approach. AI systems deemed a clear threat to users' safety, livelihoods and rights would be banned, including AI that manipulates human behavior to circumvent users' free will and systems allowing government "social scoring." High-risk uses include those involved in critical infrastructure; those that could put people's lives at risk; safety components; and law enforcement. High-risk systems would be subject to strict obligations, including adequate risk assessment and mitigation; logging activities to ensure results are traceable; and giving users clear, adequate information. "All remote biometric identification systems are considered high risk and subject to strict requirements." Limited-risk AI systems such as chatbots would have specific transparency conditions, like notifying users they're interacting with a machine. Low-risk uses such as AI-enabled videogames or spam filters, which comprise the majority of AI systems, won't face the regulation. The EC proposed that national market surveillance authorities supervise the rules and that a European Artificial Intelligence Board be established. The plan foresees voluntary codes of conduct for non-high-risk AI. It needs the European Parliament's and EU governments' OKs. Parliament's Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age welcomed the proposal. Lawmakers now "need to act on two fronts," said Chair Dragos Tudorache of Renew Europe and Romania: Reduce unnecessary burdens on startups, small and midsize businesses, and industry so "AI can be unleashed to its full economic potential" and boost citizens' rights. The Computer & Communications Industry Association applauded the risk-based approach, saying the proposal should be "clarified and targeted to avoid unnecessary red tape for developers and users. ... Regulation alone will not make the EU a leader in AI.” It's a "bold step towards pioneering regulation in this field," said the Information Technology Industry Council, urging the EC to focus on flexible rules targeted to the highest-risk applications. BSA|The Software Alliance urged the EC to engage with international partners, since building trust in AI is a shared responsibility. Others were less enthusiastic. The draft fails to prohibit "the full extent of unacceptable uses of AI," particularly biometric mass surveillance, and allows too much industry self-regulation, said European Digital Rights. The Center for Data Innovation accused the EC of striking "a damaging blow to the Commission’s goal of turning the EU into a global AI leader by creating a thicket of new rules." The recommendations overly focus on too limited a range of AI uses, said the European Consumer Organisation: It omits many uses that affect people's everyday lives, such as smart thermostats, and doesn't ensure consumers have enforceable rights.

EU efforts to quash dissemination of terrorist content online moved forward Tuesday as the European Parliament Civil Liberties Committee recommended approval of a measure on "the misuse of hosting services for terrorist purposes." European Council government ministers have greenlighted the regulation, which is expected to be approved by the full parliament later this month. Hosting service providers play a key role in the digital economy but are sometimes abused by third parties for carrying out illegal activities online, a March 18 EC memo said. Of particular concern is their misuse by terrorist groups and their supporters to spread content to radicalize and recruit followers, it said. In light of their central role and the technology and capabilities associated with the services they provide, hosting services "have particular societal responsibilities" to protect their services from misuse while preserving fundamental rights. The regulation shouldn't affect the application of directive 2000/31/EC, which grants intermediaries exemption from liability from illegal content, nor would it hamper national authorities and courts from imposing liability if hosting services violate the conditions, the memo said. The measure would apply to information society service providers that store and disseminate to the public information and material provided by a user of the service on request, regardless of whether the storing is "of a mere technical, automatic and passive nature." Providers of "mere conduit" or "caching" services -- along with other services in other layers of the internet infrastructure that don't involve storage, such as domain name registries and registrars and providers of domain name systems -- would be outside the scope. Terrorist content is often spread through services set up in third countries, so this would apply to "all providers of relevant services in the Union" that let people or entities in one or more EU countries use those services and that have a substantial connection to the countries. The legislation calls for harmonized rules on procedures for taking down terrorist content. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy & Technology, European Digital Rights and Internet Governance Project joined about 60 civil society groups in panning this. They argued it would incentivize online platforms to continue to use automated content moderation tools such as upload filters to the detriment of free speech, and that it lacks sufficient judicial oversight.

The U.S. and EU are aligning more closely on a range of digital issues, speakers said Monday at a webcast interview with European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va. Asked what their priorities are for the U.S.-EU digital relationship, Vestager said some key issues, such as secure supply chains, the approach to AI and the stance on regulating the technology sector, are obvious. Warner called for collaboration on values-based tech development that includes standards and rules on transparency and other issues. His key concern is the failure to create joint cybersecurity norms and policies, an omission he warned could be devastating. Cybersecurity must be part of every EU and U.S. discussion, Vestager said. Tech won't be successful if it's unsafe and people don't trust it, she said. Barriers to online manipulation of democracies must be integrated into everything stakeholders do and into digital skills people need as the first line of defense. When China or Russia sends hackers against a private entity or government, it will succeed without shared concepts of security services in Europe and the U.S., Warner said. On AI, Vestager noted that upcoming EC rules aim to be balanced and that their ban on certain uses of the tech will affect a limited number of cases. Warner hoped the U.S. embraces AI without subjecting people to discrimination, but this technology hasn't penetrated the U.S. policy world much yet. On content moderation on platforms, Vestager said the Digital Services Act sets up a systemic redress mechanism that balances the need to take down illegal content while preserving freedom of expression and imposes accountability on companies to ensure operations don't create risks. Platforms aren't doing enough to address disinformation, Warner said: Content moderation in the U.S. will come about in bits and pieces because the country has been so slow in addressing it.

FCC acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and Keabetswe Modimoeng, chair of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa, signed a memorandum of understanding Thursday, the FCC said. The MOU is the first of its kind between the two nations in more than 20 years, the FCC said. “I am eager to work together on priorities like 5G, rural connectivity, digital television, consumer protection, and emergency communications,” Rosenworcel said.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo suggested her agency has no plans to remove Huawei from the Entity List and said Wednesday she will aggressively use trade tools to compete with China. But she also said she will prioritize efforts to invest in U.S. technology industries over imposing more export restrictions. “My broad view is what we do on offense is more important than what we do on defense,” Raimondo told reporters. “To compete in the long run with China, we need to rebuild America in all of the ways we're talking about.” She said U.S. offensive tools include investments in domestic semiconductor manufacturing. But defensive tools may be necessary to address China’s “uncompetitive, coercive and underhanded” actions, she said, and Commerce will continue to maintain restrictions against Huawei. “A lot of people have said, is Huawei going to stay on the Entity List?” she said. “I have no reason to believe that they won't.” Commerce added seven Chinese supercomputing entities to the Entity List early Thursday, allegedly for activities that are contrary to U.S. “national security or foreign policy interests.” They were: Tianjin Phytium Information Technology, Shanghai High-Performance IC Design Center, Sunway Microelectronics, and Chinese national supercomputing centers in Jinan, Shenzhen, Wuxi and Zhengzhou. “These entities are involved with building supercomputers used by China’s military actors,” said Commerce. The Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry didn’t comment.