China's government has established a 100 billion yuan (US$14.5 billion) state fund to invest, nurture and support internet companies and spearhead the country's technological innovations and economic transformation into the so-called 'Internet Plus' era. more
China has shut down or 'dealt with' thousands of websites for sharing 'harmful' erotic or obscene content since April, the state's office for combating pornography and illegal publications announced on Thursday. more
We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because, to quote our friends at LOCKSS, "lots of copies keep stuff safe," writes founder Brewster Kahle in a blog post on Tuesday. more
Germany's Justice Minister says Facebook should be treated like a media company rather than a technology platform, suggesting he favors moves to make social media groups criminally liable for failing to remove hate speech. more
Google has announced the release of a new open-source font called Noto that supports 800 languages and covers 110 writing systems. more
The list includes Internet Pioneer, Vint Cerf; eBay Founder, Pierre Omidyar; Facebook's Dustin Moskovitz; Reddit's Alexis Ohanian; Medium's Ev Williams; Apple's Steve Wozniak; and venture capitalists Vinod Khosla and Chris Sacca. more
Google launched today a new effort to track the progress of encryption efforts - both at Google and on other popular websites. Google hopes the project will hold the company and others accountable to encrypt so as to enhance web safety and security. more
Google has announced its first initiative out of Jigsaw which is the expansion of its experimental service, Project Shield. Google is offering Project Shield as a free service leveraging Google technology to protect news and free expression sites from DDoS attacks on the web. more
Google has expanded Google Ideas, its think tank project, to a technology incubator called Jigsaw, the company announced today. Jigsaw is tasked to tackle geopolitical challenges, countering violent extremism, censorship, and other political challenges through the use of technology, says Alphabet executive chairman, Eric Schmidt in post on Medium. more
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a letter today stating "companies and organizations that run the Internet's domain name system shouldn't be in the business of policing the contents of websites, or enforcing laws that can impinge on free speech. more
Real-Time Entertainment (streaming video and audio) traffic is now responsible for over 70% of North American downstream traffic in the peak evening hours on fixed access networks, according to a new report from Sandvine. Five years ago, video and audio streaming accounted for less than 35%. more
As part of its transparency report, Google says Copyright removal requests continue to be on steady rise and that the company received a new record 65,923,523 requests just last month. more
ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade, speaking in Dublin yesterday, warned that the organization should resist attempts to be turned into a content regulator responsible for fighting piracy, counterfeiting and terrorism. more
In a large scale experiments, Russia has attempted to test the feasibility of cutting the country off the World Wide Web, according to reports. "The tests, which come amid mounting concern about a Kremlin campaign to clamp down on internet freedoms, have been described by experts as preparations for an information blackout in the event of a domestic political crisis." more
Google has been ordered by U.K.'s Information Commissioner's office to remove nine links to current news stories about older reports which themselves were removed from search results under the 'right to be forgotten' ruling. more