Digital Content

Americans prefer to keep certain information about themselves outside the purview of online searches. Given the option, 74% of US adults say it is more important to be able to “keep things about themselves from being searchable online,” while 23% say it is more important to be able to “discover potentially useful information about others.”

Avast, an antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of the world's biggest companies.

The Internet Society, a nonprofit to which the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) delegated the duty to host Public Interest Registry (PIR), announced a deal in Nov to sell PIR and its license to sell dot-org names for more than $1 billion. The buyer is Ethos Capital, a private-equity firm with investments in digital advertising, data brokering and other Internet services that has several former ICANN executives on its staff.

The editorial board of the New York Times interviewed former Vice President Joe Biden. 

Asked, "Mr. Vice President, in October, your campaign sent a letter to Facebook regarding an ad that falsely claimed that you blackmailed Ukrainian officials to not investigate your son. I’m curious, did that experience, dealing with Facebook and their power, did that change the way that you see the power of tech platforms right now?"

Google's Chrome team, advancing its web privacy effort, later in 2020 will begin testing the "privacy sandbox" proposals it unveiled in 2019. The Chrome tests are part of an effort to make it harder for publishers, advertisers and data brokers to harvest your personal data without your permission and to track you online. Other browsers, including Apple's Safari, Brave Software's Brave, Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's new Chromium-based Edge, have pushed steadily to cut tracking for the last few years.

It was the biggest corporate merger in history, and it stunned the markets. On Jan. 10, 2000, America Online, the world’s largest internet service provider, bid $183 billion for Time Warner, the world’s largest content provider. But the merger tanked. Time Warner cast off AOL in 2009. Verizon acquired AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion, less than 1% of its 2000 value, adjusted for the S&P 500 index. AT&T bought Time Warner in 2018 for 20% of the adjusted price AOL paid in 2000. The merger’s failure is often attributed to executive mismanagement and clashing corporate cultures.

YouTube said it is rolling out new protections for children viewing videos on its site, an effort to satisfy federal regulators who in 2019 fined the company tens of millions of dollars over alleged privacy violations. The changes, which include limitations on data collection and advertising, are a step toward addressing concerns from advocacy groups who have complained the Google-owned company has run afoul of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which forbids tracking and targeting users 12 and under.

Social perception bias is best defined as the all-too-human tendency to assume that everyone else holds the same opinions and values as we do. That bias might, for instance, lead us to over- or under-estimate the size and influence of an opposing group. It tends to be especially pronounced when it comes to contentious polarizing issues like race, gun control, abortion, or national elections. Researchers have long attributed this and other well-known cognitive biases to innate flaws in individual human thought processes.

Tope broadband stories from 2019:

1. Policymakers wake up to the importance of universal broadband.
2. Full court press put on broadband mapping problems. 
3. Carriers are ultra-competitive over 5G. 
4. Edge computing is hot and should get hotter.
5. Policymakers also wake up to the need for more spectrum. 
6. Windstream files for bankruptcy and Frontier could follow.
7. Fixed wireless gains momentum.
8. Video shakeup continues – with little agreement on where it’s going.