Business, Spoken

The Federal Communications Commission will no longer protect net neutrality. Now, officials in more than a dozen states are trying to take on the job. Within minutes after the FCC voted to jettison its Obama-era rules that prohibit internet providers from blocking or discriminating against lawful content, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said he would lead a multistate lawsuit against t...

It took less than two hours of debate for the Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality protections, a decision that could send ripple effects across the internet for years. Over the objections of the commission's two Democrats, the three Republican members, including Chair Ajit Pai, voted to overturn protections put in place in 2015—but not before fudging a few facts. Learn more...

The three Republican commissioners now in power at the FCC voted this week to erase the agency's legal authority over high-speed Internet providers. They claim that competition will protect consumers, that the commission shouldn't interfere in the "dynamic internet ecosystem," and that they are "protecting internet freedom." Now that the vote is done, the agency has little to do but mess around wi...

The Federal Communications Commission will vote Thursday on a plan to dismantle its net neutrality regulations. But that won’t end the fight over rules that prohibit internet service providers from creating fast lanes for some content, while blocking or throttling others. Most immediately, the activity will move to the courts, where the advocacy group Free Press, and probably others, will challeng...

Gargantuan Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million people and tens of thousands of robots making iPhones and other electronics. It has a reputation for cost cutting, including at the expense of its workers. Now, it’s teaming up with an artificial-intelligence researcher who helped trigger Google’s reorientation around machine learning in order to make its own factories more effi...

Today the Federal Communications Commission voted to overturn its rules banning internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or discriminating against lawful content. In doing so, it effectively killed net neutrality. But not every FCC commissioner was on board. The agencies's two Democratic commissioners, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel, lashed out against the order du...

From the tall windows of WIRED’s offices in San Francisco’s South-of-Market neighborhood I’ve watched almost a decade of radical change made physical in concrete and glass. The city’s forest of new skyscrapers is at least in part the legacy of Mayor Ed Lee, who died early Tuesday morning after almost seven years in office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“To the moon!” The phrase is the battle cry of true believers in cryptocurrency bitcoin---and charts of its price in recent weeks point directly heavenward. Yet beyond a batch of newly minted crypto-millionaires, the digital asset’s recent bull run has also exposed long-standing weakness in the underlying technology that could crimp bitcoin’s long-term viability. Learn more about your ad choices....

Fitbit spent its first decade selling activity trackers. With its latest moves, the company is starting to look less like a gear maker selling pricey accessories to fitness buffs and more like a medical-device company, catering to hospitals, patients, and health insurers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nichole Williams needed a career reboot. After more than a decade as a web designer in Atlanta, she felt her career was moving backward. She knew she needed to expand her programming skills to stay relevant in the field, so she signed up for Thinkful, an online-education startup that pairs students with one-on-one mentors who work with them over video-chat connections to help them learn to code. L...

Instead of listening to the thousand of startups and investors who argue that ending net neutrality would damage online innovation, FCC chair Ajit Pai is pushing a vote this Thursday to dismantle two decades of open internet protections in one of the biggest corporate giveaways in history. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Ryan Singel (@rsingel) is media and strategy fellow at the Center for Internet and Societ...

Thinking In Public I’ve been CEOing Wolfram Research for more than 30 years now. But what does that actually entail? What do I end up doing on a typical day? I certainly work hard. But I think I’m not particularly typical of CEOs of tech companies our size. Because for me, a large part of my time is spent on the front lines of figuring out how our products should be designed and architected, and w...

When Netflix debuted the second season of Stranger Things on October 27, more than 15 million people watched the first episode in the following three days. But the strangest thing about Stranger Things? Its early audience was bigger than some of this year's World Series games. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) is a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communications Commiss...

Rockets, electric cars, solar panels, batteries---whirlwind industrialist Elon Musk has set about reinventing one after another. Thursday, he added another ambitious project to the list: Future Tesla vehicles will run their self-driving AI software on a chip designed by the automaker itself. “We are developing customized AI hardware chips,” Musk told a room of AI experts from companies such as Alp...

Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai says the agency's net-neutrality rules are discouraging investment, leaving consumers with fewer, and less robust, choices for internet service, and potentially widening the digital divide. Broadband providers' own financial reports tell a different story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Justin Caldbeck, whose venture firm collapsed after six women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment in June, says he’s trying to make amends. His efforts have included handwritten notes to his accusers and others to whom he now thinks he may have acted improperly, as well as emails to women who’ve been critical of him in the media. But some recipients of Caldbeck’s "apology" emails ar...

During a pair of explosive pre-trial hearings last week, the lawsuit between self-driving Alphabet spinoff Waymo and Uber over trade secrets got an unlikely, new star player. It wasn't an engineer, like Anthony Levadowski, the former Google engineer who allegedly brought reams of Waymo trade secrets to his next big gig as head of autonomous driving at Uber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai has proposed repealing longstanding net neutrality rules. Only he has a different phrase for them: “The Obama administration’s heavy-handed regulations.” Wait a second: Did Obama really invent net neutrality? Even in a country with famously short attention spans, at least some people might have noticed that net neutrality has been around longer than...

The history of artificial intelligence is a procession of one-trick ponies. Over decades researchers have crafted a series of super-specialized programs to beat humans at tougher and tougher games. They conquered tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess. Most recently, Alphabet’s DeepMind research group shocked the world with a program called AlphaGo that mastered the Chinese board game Go. But each of th...

The recent outpouring of sexual harassment and assault allegations has helped expose not only high-profile predators, but the culture of secrecy that shielded them. Now lawmakers and advocates want to empower victims, and make it harder for serial harassers to hide, by restricting the use of nondisclosure agreements, the confidentiality provisions that obscured decades of complaints against Harvey...

Facebook says it built Messenger Kids, a new version of its popular communications app with parental controls, to help safeguard pre-teens who may be using unauthorized and unsupervised social-media accounts. Critics think Facebook is targeting children as young as 6 to hook them on its services. Facebook’s goal is to “push down the age” of when it’s acceptable for kids to be on social media, says...

FCC chair Ajit Pai’s plan to repeal net neutrality provisions and reclassify broadband providers from “common carriers” to “information services” is an unprecedented giveaway to big broadband providers and a danger to the internet. The move would mean the FCC would have almost no oversight authority over broadband providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit p...

The notorious 404 error, “Not Found,” is often, not totally erroneously, referred to as “the last page of the internet.” It’s an obligatory heads-up with an outsize reputation; it is a meme and a punch line. Bad puns abound. The error has been printed in comics and on T-shirts, an accessible and relatable facet of what was once relegated to nerd humor and is now a fact of digital life. That the 40...

President Donald Trump isn’t known for consistency. He has even occasionally waffled on immigration, his signature issue. This tendency has been on display in recent weeks, as two federal agencies made starkly different moves on telecom policy. First, the Department of Justice sued to block AT&T's proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...

Executives at ascendant tech titans like Amazon and Google tend to look down on their predecessor IBM. The fading giant of Armonk, New York, once sustained itself inventing and selling cutting-edge technology, but now leans heavily on consulting. Renting out people to help other companies with tech projects is a messier and less scalable business than selling computing power on a distant cloud ser...