Latest in Internet

After a decade-plus of having the streaming field virtually to itself, Netflix now faces historic levels of competition. Disney and other media and tech rivals have narrowed the gap, making for a rocky 2022 marked by subscriber and stock price declines. Yet Netflix has one thing its competitors will never have, and…

The man who helped launch a million memes has died. Steve Wilhite, who is credited with inventing the GIF file format, which makes possible the proliferation of funny Simpsons and SpongeBob memes across the internet, died on March 14 due to complications from Covid. His wife Kathaleen announced the news to NPR. The…

Citing progress on a number of fronts, Reddit announced this morning it plans to raise an additional $700 million, valuing the company at more than $10 billion. The late-stage Series F financing round will be led by Fidelity Management and Research and will involve other existing investors in the company. The influx…

Guggenheim Securities analyst Michael Morris has boosted his 12-month price targets for six internet companies he covers, upgraded Snap Inc. and initiated coverage of Pinterest with a buy rating. In a report summarizing the sweeping adjustments Monday, Morris cited an effort to shift analysis of the companies to bring…

UPDATE,3:31 PM: The Internet is actually not under siege and you can still watch Netflix over the weekend, it turns out – though it certainly felt like the digital world had collapsed to PONG levels for a while today. There are still some dark spots out there, and some sites proving a little rickety, but one of the…

Prosecutors in New York have settled their consumer fraud lawsuit against Charter Communications for a record $174.2 million, calling the $62.5 million direct refund to customers the biggest by an internet provider in U.S. history. The agreement settles a lawsuit alleging that the state's largest ISP, which operated…

The FCC’s controversial decision last December to eliminate regulations aimed at preserving net neutrality has been followed by a flurry of legislative action at the state and federal level. The latest salvo is a bill introduced by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), which is a companion to a House bill introduced by…

Updated: Amazon Web Services says it’s “fully recovered” from the problems that led to widespread outages of internet sites and applications today. Its Amazon Simple Storage Service (or S3) is now “operating normally.” The company began to see what it called “high error rates” around 11:00 A.M. PT. The nagging…

China’s president Xi Jinping and its propaganda chief Liu Yunshan spoke at the World Internet Conference in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province today and said that China wants to “promote equitable global Internet governance” but not at the expense of “cyber sovereignty” for other countries. Their comments (Xi’s was via video…

In a 3-2 vote along party lines, the FCC today supported Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal — introduced earlier this month — to begin a proceeding that could strengthen Internet users’ privacy rights. It might lead to new rules empowering web users to keep private data about who they are, where they go, the sites they…

This will make your blood boil. Marriott International admitted that it de-authenticated visitor and exhibitor connections to their mobile hotspots at Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center, requiring them to pay as much as $1,000 per device to link to the hotel’s Wi-Fi system, the FCC disclosed…

It’s possible as content providers plan a massive Internet data dump on Tuesday, one that could break traffic records and put ISPs and WiFi networks to the test. “We're going to see long download times, more buffering of streams, more QoS issues and ISPs that will take steps to deal with the traffic, knowing it will…