Bloomberg

Google just paid for part of its acquisition of DeepMind in a surprising way. The Internet giant is using technology from the DeepMind artificial intelligence subsidiary for big savings on the power consumed by its data centers, according to DeepMind Co-Founder Demis Hassabis.

In recent months, the Alphabet unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said. The system cut power usage in the data centers by several percentage points, "which is a huge saving in terms of cost but, also, great for the environment," he said. The savings translate into a 15 percent improvement in power usage efficiency.

[Commentary] Schools, healthcare providers, libraries and other anchor institutions are the gateway to the community. These non-profit and governmental organizations increasingly provide essential Internet services to students, patients, patrons and underprivileged people. But their ability to meet these community needs depends on being able to obtain affordable, high-capacity broadband connections that often do not exist, especially in rural and non-competitive markets.

The 2010 National Broadband Plan Goal #4 called for every community to have affordable gigabit level broadband to anchor institutions by the year 2020. While we have made significant progress in the last six years, there is much more work to be done to meet that goal. The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB Coalition) will be releasing an important Broadband Action Plan for Community Anchor Institutions on Wednesday, July 13. One of the most important recommendations of this Action Plan is the need to rein in the prices for special access services, also called “business data services.” Communities are clamoring for better, faster, more affordable broadband to support their public institutions. As we’ll outline in our Grow2Gig+ Action Plan, we believe addressing a lack of competition in business data services is an important step forward. We have the opportunity to dramatically improve teaching and learning, to offer equal and ubiquitous access to broadband for our communities and begin to reach goals we have set for ourselves.

[John Windhausen is Executive Director of the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition]

According to published reports, ESPN pays roughly double what the three broadcast networks do for the rights to air National Football League games, $1.9 billion per year.

ESPN aired the fewest games, with only 17. But unlike the other networks, which have to share the fans’ attention on Sundays, ESPN owns Monday -- a weeknight in prime time.

Not surprisingly, Monday Night Football is the highest-rated show on cable television and the highest-rated show for young men. ESPN has been able to pass along its additional costs to the cable operators -- which, in turn, pass them to the customer to the tune of $6/month/subscriber.

The bad news for the privacy-conscious is that big Web companies and dozens of startups have begun testing or using cookie alternatives that are often more difficult to spot or disable.

These programs “don’t have consumer controls already there,” says Lou Montulli, who invented the cookie 20 years ago and is now a co-founder of Zetta, a cloud storage startup. “Once they go into effect, consumers have no ability to turn them off.”

Some programs track users by their IP addresses; others look at users’ operating systems and other factors. Startups are promising advertisers that they can deliver, without cookies, data comparable to what the big Web companies collect.

Millennials are chucking their checkbooks and cash. EBay’s mobile-payment tool called Venmo handled $314 million in mobile payments in the first quarter of 2014, up 62 percent from the prior quarter.

The broader mobile-wallet market was slow to catch on with a wide audience. Yet, the rising use of peer-to-peer applications among 20-somethings is improving the prospects for adoption of all kinds of smartphone-based payments.

China Mobile rose to the highest in six years after saying it will cut $2 billion from the subsidies that help consumers in the world’s largest market pay for smartphones from Apple and Samsung Electronics.

“With fewer subsidies, consumers may opt for cheaper devices made by local producers in favor of those sold by Apple and Samsung,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts John Butler and Matthew Kanterman said.

Carl Icahn, who disclosed a new activist stake in Gannett, had planned to mount a campaign to separate the company’s print and broadcasting businesses before Gannett beat him to it.

He still wants to talk with management. Icahn Associates acquired about 6.6 percent of Gannett’s shares and options during the second quarter, with the belief that “value could be created by splitting the issuer into separate print and broadcast companies,” the fund said.

[Commentary] The town of Rockport (ME) opened its own gigabit-scale municipal fiber optic network -- meaning it can transmit a thousand megabits of data a second. It is the first such network in Maine.

Most importantly, the Rockport network provides a replicable model for towns and cities across the country. Rockport's town-owned gigabit network doesn't directly serve subscribers, which means Rockport isn't competing in the private market. Instead, the town is making its network -- made up of so-called dark fiber, which carries a potentially unlimited amount of communications data -- available to any private service provider.

Creating jobs and competing with other countries depend on ubiquitous, inexpensive fiber connectivity, so we need all the help we can get.

[Crawford is John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School]

Cisco Systems is cutting 6,000 jobs and forecasting little to no revenue growth in the current quarter amid a slump in demand from phone and cable companies, and weakness in emerging markets.

The world’s largest networking-equipment maker, which has about 74,000 employees, said it will take a pretax charge of as much as $700 million. Including the latest round of firings, which represent about 8 percent of the workforce, Cisco has eliminated more than 18,000 people since 2011.

Amazon’s treatment of customers means more to US antitrust authorities than how the largest Web retailer pressures publishers and movie studios.

Successfully going after Amazon at this stage “would be breaking new territory under the antitrust laws,” David Balto, a former policy director at the Federal Trade Commission, said.

That hasn’t damped debate about the tactics Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos is using against Hachette Book Group, Walt Disney and film studio Warner Bros. The question is whether he’s pushing Amazon toward the same monopolistic territory that tripped up Microsoft, Standard Oil and AT&T.