Google this week reported a steep decline in profits. Social media companies such as Meta said that advertising sales — the heart of their businesses — have rapidly cooled off. And Microsoft, perhaps the tech industry’s most reliable performer, predicted a slowdown through at least the end of the year.
In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.
Google, Apple and Microsoft reported record-breaking quarterly sales and profits on Tuesday night as the firms continue to benefit from a pandemic that has created a “perfect positive storm” for big tech.
The original source code for the world wide web has been sold as a non-fungible token, making $5.4m.
The giant tech companies with their power-hungry, football-field-size data centers are not the environmental villains they are sometimes portrayed to be on social media and elsewhere.
Fastly Inc., the company behind a major global internet outage this week, said on Wednesday the incident was caused by a bug in its software that was triggered when one of its customers changed their settings.
Epic has accused Apple of unfairly using its App Store’s power to take a cut of the money made in Fortnite, a popular online game.
It’s not just the value of bitcoin that has soared in the last year – so has the huge amount of energy it consumes.
A growing share of Americans are concerned about the environment, and the big U.S. tech companies would seem to be in a position to lead the way on fighting climate change.
Google is planning to invest $10 billion in India as part of plans to make the internet “affordable and useful” for a billion people.