Turns out that the Association of National Advertisers isn't any happier with Mozilla's cookie-blocking plan than the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The ANA said today in a blog post that Mozilla's "dangerous and highly disturbing" plan to block third-party cookies by default will be "extraordinarily counterproductive for consumers and business."

Netflix said today that it's moving forward with a plan to integrate with Facebook by automatically sharing people's movie-watching history with their friends. The company will only share this data if Facebook users give the go-ahead through the social networking service. But once users do so, the titles of movies they've viewed will be shown to their friends when they log into Netflix.

Lest there be any doubt, the Interactive Advertising Bureau made clear today that it doesn't want Mozilla's Firefox browser to start blocking third-party cookies by default. "If Mozilla follows through on its plan to block all third-party cookies, the disruption will disenfranchise every single internet user," IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg said on Tuesday in a lengthy condemnation of Mozilla's plans.

Authors and publishers are urging the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to prohibit Amazon from acquiring some new top-level domain names -- including ".book," ".author," and ".read."

Google will pay $7 million to settle an investigation stemming from the company's Wi-Spy scandal, All Things D reported this afternoon.

A victory for the Authors Guild in its copyright infringement case against Google would do nothing less than destroy the "modern version of the card catalog," the search company argues in new court papers filed this week.

The White House on Monday threw its support behind the proposition that consumers should be able to unlock their smartphones without worrying about criminal charges. Within two days, several lawmakers said they were prepping legislation to that effect.

Seems like even the most basic privacy-related moves by the Internet standards group World Wide Web Consortium are causing controversy these days. The latest example stems from a relatively routine procedural decision to extend the charter of the Tracking Protection Working Group, which is trying to forge a consensus about online tracking and targeting. Three weeks ago, the W3C's Tracking Protection Working Group announced it had renewed its charter through April of 2014. That seemingly simple move -- which effectively enabled the group to continue working -- is now triggering some pushback from the industry.

The Obama administration said this afternoon that it supports lifting a month-old ban on unlocking mobile devices. "Consumers should be able to unlock their cell phones without risking criminal or other penalties," R. David Edelman, senior advisor for Internet, Innovation & Privacy wrote today, adding that the same principle should apply to tablets.

For the first time in five years, the self-regulatory group Network Advertising Initiative is updating its code of conduct.