Canipre is a Canadian company that helps runs anti-piracy campaigns, and is helping Voltage Pictures in their efforts to extort money out of pirates using settlement-o-matic mass lawsuits. They've most recently been helping Voltage target easier marks like Canadian ISP TekSavvy. As such, it's interesting to note that this week a company so concerned about propriety has been accused of using other people's photos on their website without proper attribution. "Our collective goal is not to sue everybody...but to change the sense of entitlement that people have, regarding Internet-based theft of property," Canipre Director Barry Logan stated in a recent interview.

According to the Globe and Mail, Canadian incumbent Rogers is the latest ISP to try and battle Netflix by copying Netflix. The ISP is cooking up their own Netflix clone and is even considering creating their own original content, something that Amazon, Hulu and Netflix have all been exploring to lessen content licensing fees.

Germany's incumbent broadband provider Deutsche Telekom is taking immense heat this week for the announcement that they'll not only be capping and throttling its broadband subscribers, but that the company's own video content will not be hindered by the cap. The company announced on Monday announced that they'll be imposing caps as low a 75 GB per month on users starting May 1, and if exceeded, users will find themselves throttled back to a paltry 384 kbps unless they pony up an unspecified fee for additional bandwidth.

For some time now rumors have suggested that Verizon was trying to buy out UK wireless carrier Vodafone's 45% stake in Verizon Wireless after talks of a full merger stalled last December. Earlier this month, anonymous sources suggested that Verizon had even eyed buying all of Vodafone in a joint bid with AT&T, though Verizon denied any talks with AT&T. Now those ever-busy "people familiar with the matter" tell Reuters Verizon is preparing a $100 billion bid to acquire Vodafone's Verizon Wireless stake. Most of the leaks appear to be coming from Verizon in order to apply pressure on Vodafone, but given how long we've been reading these rumors, that doesn't appear to be working very well.

Akamai's latest state of the Internet report proclaims that the average (not median) downstream connection speed in the United States is 7.4 Mbps. The company's press release notes the data is now culled from over 700 million IP addresses across 240 countries.

Hoping to thwart crime and abuse on the Tor network, Japanese police have resorted to begging ISPs in the country to voluntarily block access to the network. Tor allows the transfer of information without sharing the usual traditional personal identifiers, something that has allegedly thwarted a Japanese police hunt for several hackers.

While we all lust over 1 Gbps connections most of us can't get, Sony-run Japanese ISP So-net Entertainment this week pushed the residential needle to 2 Gbps in Japan. The speedy service is named "Nuro," and will cost 4,980 yen ($51) per month, providing Japanese customers with 2 Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream. The service requires users sign a two-year contract and pay a 52,500 yen ($539) installation fee -- which the company says they're waiving if users order the service online. The Nuro service is being offered primarily to smaller apartment complexes in Chiba, Gunma, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Tokyo, Kanagawa and Saitama.

The Canadian wireless market very briefly showed signs of competitive life over the last few years as smaller upstarts like Wind Mobile appeared, despite the very best efforts of incumbent companies to prevent that from ever happening. A few years on however, and many of these smaller operators are preparing to sell themselves off -- to the same large, anti-competitive incumbents they were supposed to help keep in check. Telus appears poised to buy Mobilcity, Public Mobile has hired investment bankers to find a buyer, and rumblings of Wind being sold (potentially to Rogers, barring regulatory objection) have been stumbling around since January.

It was forty years ago today that Martin Cooper (who we often use in the story photo to the upper right) placed the first mobile phone call to a fellow engineer at Motorola. In an older interview with the BBC, Cooper states they knew they had something compelling, but had doubts about massive adoption due to potentially prohibitive costs. As of last year, there were six billion mobile connections globally. "It pleases me no end to have had some small impact on people's lives because these phones do make people's lives better," said Cooper. "They promote productivity, they make people more comfortable, they make them feel safe and all of those things." Let's not forget smartphone fart apps.

For some time now rumors have suggested that Verizon was trying to buy out UK wireless carrier Vodafone's 45% stake in Verizon Wireless after talks of a full merger stalled last December. In an interestering twist, anonymous sources tell the Financial Times that Verizon is now working in conjunction with AT&T to buy Vodafone outright.

According to the New York Times, the Russian government has started using a new law that allows it to begin censoring Internet content. The effort, as most Internet filtering attempts do, has originated with the supposed interest in protecting children from harmful content. As such, the government has demanded that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube begin removing content that promotes suicide and drug use. Google is the only one standing up to the request so far, refusing to take down a video that simply showed how to create a fake wound using a makeup materials and a razor blade. This being Putinland, many are of course concerned that the effort is simply the opening salvo of a much larger attempt at Internet censorship.

UK's marketing regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) – has censured Virgin Media for claiming that their broadband is unlimited. The ASA's ruling, the first to use new guidance on use of the term 'unlimited', prevents the fastest of the UK's main ISPs from using the line: Unlimited downloads: Download and browse as much as you like with no caps and no hidden charges.

ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Touré has proposed a new plan that would aim to have the entire world wired with 20 Mbps, $20 connections by 2020. At a meeting focused on technology gender equality and the shoring up the provisioning of broadband access to women, Touré unveiled the goal, naming it "Goal 20-20 by 2020." As it stands, the ITU's only real guideline on this front is to urge all countries to have some kind of broadband plan, something countries are of course free to ignore. How we get to 20/20 by 2020 isn't clear; getting 20 Mbps to parts of rural United States is already a significant challenge, before even considering the significantly poorer regions of the planet.

• Google Fiber could bring superfast Internet to every town in America, but for now the company is thinking small [slate.com]
• 4G Smartphone Usage Up 70% Among Small Businesses [cellphonedigest.net]
• Apple proposes 'on-the-go' wireless charging via iPad Smart Cover with built-in battery [appleinsider.com]
• Google Pulls Several Prominent Ad-Blocking Apps From Play Store For Violating Developer Distribution Agreement [techcrunch.com]
• FinSpy Software Used To Surveil Activists Around The World [huffingtonpost.com]
• With User Profiles Still In Testing, Netflix’s Social Sharing Feature Makes No Sense [techcrunch.com]
• Blue Coat, Skype and QQ named despots' best friends - Reporters Without Borders slams "enemies of the internet" [theregister.co.uk]
• What's most important? Bandwidth over kilo-miles, or milli-watts? IBM, AT&T brainboxes beg to differ [theregister.co.uk]
• Rumor Mill: T-Mobile to launch handset trade-in program in shift to Value plans [fiercewireless.com]
• Networking Battles to Run the World [nytimes.com]
• Google Hastens to Show Its Concern for Privacy [nytimes.com]

*For more interesting links to broadband and related tech news from DSLReports.com & other sites throughout the day, follow me on Twitter @ChrisBBReports!*

• Verizon to use cable spectrum for LTE starting this year [cnet.com]
• Fears over spectrum shortage allayed by HSPA+ and LTE [fiercewireless.com]
• Point Topic Claim Residential Demand for 1Gbps Fibre Broadband is Low [ispreview.co.uk]
• Verizon Wireless BlackBerry Z10 goes on sale March 28th, pre-orders begin tomorrow [theverge.com]
• LTE Market Nearly Doubling in 2013 [businesswire.com]
• Fast, unlimited wireless at last? What a combined T-Mobile-MetroPCS means to you [theverge.com]
• Wireless carriers stand to make a killing by tracking your every move [bgr.com]
• More Hotels Embrace Free Wi-Fi in Lobbies [newsfactor.com]
• Security Leader Says U.S. Would Retaliate Against Cyberattacks [nytimes.com]
• Samsung Targets Galaxy 4 at Apple’s Core IPhone Market [bloomberg.com]
• Verizon Wireless making a push for global LTE roaming [fiercewireless.com]

*For more interesting links to broadband and related tech news from DSLReports.com & other sites throughout the day, follow me on Twitter @ChrisBBReports!*

• Netflix intros a dedicated ISP speed index page to highlight streaming champions [engadget.com]
• OTT services beneficial to 'dumb pipe' ISPs [zdnet.com]
• AT&T's Network Has Fastest 4G LTE Speeds [prnewswire.com]
• 4G UK: Operators say ‘no' to unlimited data plans, except for Three [neowin.net]
• "Zero TV” Households Now At 5 Million, Says Nielsen, Up From 3 Million In 2007, But Still Just 5% Of Market [techcrunch.com]
• Can anyone turn streaming music into a real business? [theverge.com]
• Watching a Video on Your Phone? You’re Probably Using an iPhone, Not an Android [allthingsd.com]
• Earthquake killed your network? Satellite-over-balloon to the rescue! [theregister.co.uk]
• How UK gov's 'growth' measures are already killing the web [theregister.co.uk]
• PS Vita fire sale in Sony stores could signal plans to axe 3G model [theverge.com]

*For more interesting links to broadband and related tech news from DSLReports.com & other sites throughout the day, follow me on Twitter @ChrisBBReports!*

Iran, like Pakistan, in 2011 decided to make use of VPNs illegal, claiming the move was necessary for "security reasons" and to "stop militants" (easier spying is of course just coincidence). Reuters notes that the Iranian government have lately been clamping down harder on VPNs, hunting down and shuttering "illegal" VPNs. The country allows only official, surveillance-ready VPNs to operate. The clamp down comes as Iran prepares for its presidential election in June. Iran also filters or bans Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube significantly.

With carriers now happily (and retroactively legally) dumping all voice and Internet data in real time in the NSA's lap, the agency needed more computing power to dig through the noise. The NSA's new $2 billion supercomputer warehouse in Bluffdale, Utah, exposed by Wired last year, is the answer to that problem -- housing 25,000 square feet of traffic analysis computing power. Forbes (hat tip to Techdirt) rather unsurprisingly found that the government doesn't like visitors with cameras at their under-construction super spy-warehouse, and the story is worth an amusing read. The supercomputer center is slated to come online in September.

Quite unsurprisingly, the GSMA's new Mobile Economy 2013 report argues that worldwide mobile operator data revenue will exceed that of voice by 2017. In the United States and the UK that timeline is quicker, with data revenues exceeding voice by 2014. That obvious trajectory is of course reflected in AT&T and Verizon's shift to family data plans, where they charge more for data (with $15 per gigabyte overage fees) but offer unlimited voice and SMS services -- since SMS and voice have truly become just data. That said, SMS has held on quite stubbornly in the States (compared to Asia), where carriers are expected to continue making a killing on SMS well into 2015.

The French government has announced that the country will be spending $27 billion in public and private funds to construct a new high-speed fiber network the country hopes will spur economic growth. According to Reuters, 50% of the country should be covered by the faster speeds by the end of 2017, though exact service speeds haven't been specified. France has had great success taking our concept of local loop unbundling to foster competition in cities, with many able to get a full suite of IPTV channels, 50 Mbps broadband and phone service for less than $50 a month. Still, the country faces the same problems as elsewhere with carriers refusing to tackle less profitable areas.