News

CEO of social media app Parler says board fired him

John Matze says he has been fired as CEO of Parler, which was among social media services used to plan the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. Matze’s announcement Wednesday followed Amazon’s Jan. 11 decision to remove Parler from its web-hosting service over its unwillingness to remove posts […]

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may step down without stepping away

Even after stepping aside as CEO, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will likely keep identifying new frontiers for the world’s dominant e-commerce company. His successor, meanwhile, gets to deal with escalating efforts to curtail Amazon’s power. Tuesday’s announcement that Bezos will hand off the CEO job this summer came as a surprise. But it doesn’t mean […]

GameStop's stupefying stock rise doesn't hide its reality

Behind GameStop’s stock surge is the grim reality of its prospects: The video game retailer is floundering even as the industry around it is booming. GameStop has been swept up in a battle between big-moneyed hedge funds betting against it and small investors trying to prop it up. That has caused GameStop’s share price to […]

Microsoft backs Australian plan to make Google pay for news

Microsoft said on Wednesday it supports Australia’s plans to make the biggest digital platforms pay for news and would help small businesses transfer their advertising to Bing if Google quits the country. Microsoft has been positioning itself to increase market share for its search engine Bing after a Google executive told a Senate hearing last […]

Google shutters internal Stadia game studio

Google is closing the internal studio tasked with developing games for its Stadia cloud-gaming service, a move that raises questions about the future of the Stadia service itself. Google launched Stadia in November 2019 as a new type of video-game platform that operates without a console and that stores game-playing sessions in the cloud. It […]

Australian prime minister says Bing could replace Google

The Australian prime minister said on Monday that Microsoft was confident that it could fill the void if Google carried out its threat to remove its search engine from Australia. A Google executive told a Senate hearing last month that it would likely make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government went ahead […]

Fight The Man: What GameStop's surge says about online mobs

It’s a fable for our times: Small-time investors band together to take down greedy Wall Street hedge funds using the stock of a troubled video-game store. But the revolt of online stock-traders suggests much more. The internet is shifting society’s balance of power in unanticipated ways. And the same tools that empower the little guy […]

Apple CEO escalates battle with Facebook over online privacy

Apple CEO Tim Cook fired off a series of thinly veiled shots at Facebook and other social media companies Thursday, escalating an online privacy battle pitting the iPhone maker against digital services that depend on tracking people to help sell ads. “Too many are still asking the question ‘how much can we get away with?’ […]

IMF: Vaccines will power 5.5% global economic growth in 2021

The spread of COVID-19 vaccines will power a stronger global economic recovery in 2021, the International Monetary Fund forecast Tuesday. After sinking 3.5% in 2020, the worst year since World War II, the global economy will grow 5.5% this year, the 190-country lending organization predicted. The new figure for 2021 is an upgrade from the […]

Debate heats up over how countries tax Big Tech companies

An international debate over how countries tax big U.S. technology companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook is heating up, presenting a challenge for President Joe Biden’s new administration. A mid-year deadline is on the horizon for talks about a global deal to defuse trade disputes with France and other countries that are imposing go-it-alone […]