New York Times

[Commentary] Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and Facebook are among the 10 largest companies in the world. Alphabet alone has a market capitalization of around $550 billion. AT&T and Time Warner combined would be about $300 billion. Alphabet has an 83 percent share of the mobile search market in the United States and just under 63 percent of the US mobile phone operating systems market. AT&T has a 32 percent market share in mobile phones and 26 percent in pay TV. The combined AT&T-Time Warner will have $8 billion in cash but $171 billion of net debt, according to the research company MoffettNathanson. Compare that to Alphabet’s balance sheet, with total cash of $76 billion and total debt of about $3.94 billion. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, according to Brian Nowak, an analyst with Morgan Stanley. Google and Facebook can achieve huge net profit margins because they dominate the content made available on the web while making very little of it themselves. Instead, they both have built their advertising businesses as “free riders” on content made by others, some of it from Time Warner. The rise of these digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries of our country.

[Taplin is the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”]

[Commentary] Television news is going to have to do its part should President-elect Donald Trump and his administration try to make policy based on false assertions, the same way he used them on the campaign trail. (And, yes, television will have to be just as vigilant should Mr. Trump’s opponents use falsehoods to fight him, too.) The same holds for all of the news media, of course. But live television can be a safe harbor for falsehood and deflection. It’s easy for me to criticize as a columnist who has time to analyze and fact-check before writing. On television, in real time, even the best-prepared interviewers may have neither the time nor the facts to catch a lie and call it out. Even when they do, their attempts to call foul can turn into stalemates if the interviewee insists on continuing to forward something that’s false or unsubstantiated, which seems to be the latest craze. CNN’s Jake Tapper said, in this “year in which basic facts and basic decency are at risk, persistence is important at the end of the day.”

As increasing focus is being paid to the wealth and jobs created by tech companies outside Silicon Valley, Google’s arrival in small-town Pryor (OK) serves as a complex example of what happens when a modern internet company builds one of its data centers in a community. While they do bring in some work, these mostly automated facilities will never provide the thousands of good-paying blue-collar jobs that come with a new auto plant. What they do bring, however, is some stability to local tax revenues, and — at least in the case of Google — a cash-rich megacompany looking to make nice with the locals.

President-elect Donald Trump is entering office with financial entanglements that are exotic and far-flung: a condominium project in Manila, a luxury furniture maker in Istanbul, golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, and a hotel in Azerbaijan. But starting in January, Trump’s most visible business interest will be beamed directly into millions of American living rooms: “The Celebrity Apprentice” is back, and the president-elect is coming with it.

Just weeks before Inauguration Day, President-elect Trump will resume his role as an executive producer of the NBC reality show, an unlikely side project for a commander in chief, and one that is poised to bring him hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. Modern presidents, including the current one, have received royalties from sales of memoirs and book projects. But Trump’s ties to the show — now starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and renamed “The New Celebrity Apprentice” — potentially thrust the president-elect into a host of potential conflicts, from coziness with the brands that advertise on the show to his relationship with the network that airs it.

President Barack Obama has ordered American intelligence agencies to produce a full report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. He also directed them to develop a list of “lessons learned” from the broad campaign the United States has accused Russia of carrying out to steal e-mails, publish their contents and probe the vote-counting system. “We may have crossed a new threshold here,” said Lisa Monaco, one of President Obama’s closest aides and the former head of the national security division of the Justice Department. “He expects to receive this report before he leaves office.”

The report, according to senior administration officials, will trace the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and on prominent individuals like John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But it is unclear that the contents of the report will be made public. Intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which still has an active investigation of the hacking underway, have been reluctant to make public any of their findings; they fear it will reveal sources and methods of how the incursions were traced back to Russia. After past investigations involving sensitive intelligence information, declassified versions of reports were sometimes published, with a classified version sent to congressional committees and some agencies.

Thirty years as a union boss in Indiana have given Chuck Jones a thick skin. But even threats to shoot him or burn his house down did not quite prepare him for becoming the target of a verbal takedown by the next president of the United States.

In what one Republican strategist described as “cyberbullying,” President-elect Donald J. Trump derided Jones on Twitter, accusing him of doing “a terrible job representing workers” and blaming him for the decisions by companies that ship American jobs overseas. The messages continued Mr. Trump’s pattern of digital assaults, most of them aimed at his political rivals, reporters, Hollywood celebrities or female accusers. But rarely has Trump used Twitter to express his ire at people like Jones, the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, who described himself as “just a regular working guy.” With the full power of the presidency just weeks away, Trump’s decision to single out Jones for ridicule has drawn condemnation from historians and White House veterans.

By the time you finish reading this column, you would be foolish not to download the messaging app Signal onto your smartphone and computer. The free encrypted messaging service has won the acclaim of security researchers and privacy advocates, including Edward J. Snowden. All have said that Signal goes above and beyond other chat tools in keeping electronic communications private. And now more than ever, we may need it. That’s because hacks are on the rise — look at how the activist group WikiLeaks posted a trove of e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, for all to see.

Many are also watching for how government surveillance may grow under Donald J. Trump, who has chosen Mike Pompeo, who advocates greater surveillance, to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Signal is one of many encrypted messaging services, but it stands out for its uncompromising security and ease of use. The chat service retains virtually no information from users, including messages and address books, on its servers. What’s more, messages remain encrypted when passing through Signal’s servers, meaning that the app’s creators can’t read them.

It did not take long after election night for the donations to start pouring in to America’s nonprofit journalism organizations. Almost a month later, the money keeps coming, in $10 and $20 and sometimes hundreds of dollars or more from small donors all over the country. At ProPublica, the investigative news organization that pledges to hold the powerful accountable, the postelection haul, $750,000, has easily eclipsed the total raised from small-dollar donors in all of 2015, about $500,000. The list goes on.

From local public radio affiliates to established watchdog groups to start-ups that focus on a single issue, nonprofit, nonpartisan media is having a moment. Just what is motivating these donors — whether it is a partisan response to the election of Donald J. Trump or a broader concern over the viability of a troubled industry — is a matter of speculation, executives say. But one thing seems increasingly clear: Independent accountability journalism is gaining new support among many Americans mulling the election’s outcome and the country’s political divide.

Edgar M. Welch, a 28-year-old father of two from Salisbury (NC) recently read online that Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in northwest Washington, was harboring young children as sex slaves as part of a child-abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton. The articles making those allegations were widespread across the web, appearing on sites including Facebook and Twitter. Apparently concerned, Welch drove about six hours from his home to Comet Ping Pong to see the situation for himself, according to court documents. Not long after arriving at the pizzeria, the police said, he fired from an assault-like AR-15 rifle. The police arrested him. They found a rifle and a handgun in the restaurant. No one was hurt.

Unbeknown to Welch, what he had been reading online were fake news articles about Comet Ping Pong, which have swollen in number over time. The false articles against the pizzeria began appearing on social networks and websites in late October, not long before the presidential election, with the restaurant identified as being the headquarters for a child-trafficking ring. The articles were soon exposed as false by publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and the fact-checking website Snopes. But the debunking did not squash the conspiracy theories about Comet Ping Pong — instead, it led to the opposite.

For all the good that has come from the internet, the online world has also served as a powerful device for recruiting terrorists and spreading their propaganda. A coalition of top technology companies is now trying to change that.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft announced that they have teamed up to fight the spread of terrorist content over the web by sharing technology and information to reduce the flow of terrorist propaganda across their services. The group plans to create a kind of shared digital database, “fingerprinting” all of the terrorist content that is flagged. By collectively tracking that information, the companies said they could make sure a video posted on Twitter, for instance, did not appear later on Facebook. Through the coalition, technology companies will use “hashes,” or what they describe as “unique digital fingerprints,” to identify terrorist imagery and videos uploaded to their services.