Google and the Department of Justice faced off again in a trial regarding whether Google has a monopoly in the advertising technology market. The trial started last fall in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, and on April 17th, 2025, Judge Brinkema ruled that Google did act illegally to acquire and maintain monopoly power in online advertising.

The DOJ argued that Google unfairly locked up the market for ad tech tools that publishers and advertisers rely on to monetize their websites and market their goods. Google responded that it created efficient products that work well for customers and said it faced plenty of competition.

This partial loss for Google comes on the heels of a historic ruling in favor of the government in a different antitrust trial against Google before a different judge. There, a DC District Court judge ruled Google had illegally monopolized the online search market. So, while the ad tech case plays out, the government is simultaneously requesting ground-shaking remedies to restore competition in search.

Read on below for all of the updates and notes from the case.

• Google and the DOJ make their final arguments in the ad tech monopoly case
• Google’s empire is under siege
• Tech critics want a Google exec punished for deleted chats
• Google is replacing the exec in charge of Search and ads
• How Google tried to unravel the DOJ’s ad tech case
• Google and the DOJ are out of court until November 25th.
• Google says a closed ad ecosystem isn’t anticompetitive — it’s just safer
• How Google made the ad tech industry revolve around itself
• TL;DR on the DOJ’s ad tech antitrust trial against Google.
• Why Google is back in court for another monopoly showdown
• Google employees’ attempts to hide messages from investigators might backfire
• In US v. Google, YouTube’s CEO defends the Google way
• How Google got away with charging publishers more than anyone else
• How Google altered a deal with publishers who couldn’t say no
• Google dominates online ads, says antitrust trial witness, but publishers are feeling ‘stuck’
• Google’s ad server is “slow and clunky” — but virtually everybody uses it.
• Day 2 of the Google-DOJ antitrust trial begins.
• Google and the DOJ’s ad tech fight is all about control
• Google and the Justice Department have made their opening salvos in court.
• The Google ad tech trial is kicking off this morning.
• Google and DOJ return for round two of their antitrust fight — this time about ads

Wikipedia is attempting to dissuade artificial intelligence developers from scraping the platform by releasing a dataset that’s specifically optimized for training AI models. The Wikimedia Foundation announced on Wednesday that it had partnered with Kaggle — a Google-owned data science community platform that hosts machine learning data — to publish a beta dataset of “structured Wikipedia content in English and French.”

Wikimedia says the dataset hosted by Kaggle has been “designed with machine learning workflows in mind,” making it easier for AI developers to access machine-readable article data for modeling, fine-tuning, benchmarking, alignment, and analysis. The content within the dataset is openly licensed, and as of April 15th, includes research summaries, short descriptions, image links, infobox data, and article sections — minus references or non-written elements like audio files.

The “well-structured JSON representations of Wikipedia content” available to Kaggle users should be a more attractive alternative to “scraping or parsing raw article text” according to Wikimedia — an issue that’s currently putting strain on Wikipedia’s servers as automated AI bots relentlessly consume the platform’s bandwidth. Wikimedia already has content sharing agreements in place with Google and the Internet Archive, but the Kaggle partnership should make that data more accessible for smaller companies and independent data scientists.

“As the place the machine learning community comes for tools and tests, Kaggle is extremely excited to be the host for the Wikimedia Foundation’s data,” said Kaggle partnerships lead Brenda Flynn. “Kaggle is excited to play a role in keeping this data accessible, available, and useful.”

Notion is launching the third app in its suite of work tools, an email app called Notion Mail. (The other two, of course, are Notion Calendar and Notion itself.) The app, available now for web and Mac and in testing for iOS, is the next step in Notion’s attempt to compete with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Notion wants to be the hub for all your work, and it knows that means getting email right.

I’ve been testing Notion Mail for the last few days, and the app is roughly what I expected so far. It looks nice, trading Gmail’s countless menus and inscrutable buttons for a simple, text-first look. It’s very customizable, too: you can change what appears in your inbox and in what order, show more or less information with each message, toggle dark and light mode, and more. “We’re thinking about it from a Notion perspective,” says Jason Ginsberg, one of the leaders on the Notion Mail team. (Ginsberg and Andrew Milich founded a productivity tools company called Skiff, which was acquired by Notion last year.) 

One of Notion Mail’s most powerful features is its AI-powered organization. When you set up the app, it asks whether you’d like to automatically sort things like promotional emails or calendar invites into their own section. Useful, certainly, but so far so Gmail. When you open an email, though, a button appears at the top of the thread prompting you to “auto label similar.” If you click it, Notion’s AI will crawl through your inbox looking for other messages like it — not just matching sender or subject line, but by actually determining what’s in the email and what you might care about. You can also create a label with a chatbot-style prompt. Either way, the app presents you with some guesses, and you pick which ones should and shouldn’t be labeled together with your current thread. From then on, any new email that fits the category gets labeled automatically.

The AI labeler isn’t perfect, but it’s very handy. I clicked the button on an email containing a receipt, and Notion Mail went and found a bunch of other receipts to label, as well. (It also found a couple of unrelated emails from Chase and eBay, but those were easy enough to turn off.) Once I hit save, I was presented with a new “Payment Receipt” section in Notion Mail showing all my receipts. Well, not all: there’s no obvious way to go back in time and comb through everything, so now I have a whopping two days of receipts collated together.

Notion calls these separate sections “Views,” and they’re one of the more powerful parts of Notion Mail. “Think of each view as a collection of filters,” Milich says, “that you can combine however you want.” You could have one that combines all your confirmation emails and receipts in one mega-travel space. You could have another for all your newsletters, as well as one just for your must-reads. These views sync back to the Gmail interface as labels, and they don’t mess with the sanctity of your inbox, but they do offer a new way to put things together. It’s a little like the idea behind Google Inbox, but much less in your face.

As you start to use the app, you start to uncover more of Notion Mail’s features. (One gripe I have with the app so far: it hides a lot of what it can do, arguably for too long, in the name of simple design.) You can use Notion-style slash commands to format text, but also to insert a built-in scheduling tool connected to your calendar, or a template that can automatically add information like a Zoom link or your recipient’s first name. Notion’s AI can even write and edit your emails, if you like. You can find most things with a CMD-K shortcut to bring up the command bar, but many of them are pretty hidden otherwise.

There are some bugs and missing features in this first version. It only works with Gmail accounts, for one thing, and Milich wouldn’t give me a date for Outlook or other account support. It’s also missing Windows and all mobile platforms — there’s an iOS app coming soon, it appears, but the rest are likely to be further behind. Even beyond all that, I wish Notion Mail would let you see multiple mail accounts at once; switching between them is just annoying. I’ve seen others report attachments behaving strangely or disappearing altogether, though I haven’t had that issue myself.

In general, the app makes perfect sense for Notion. The idea, Milich says, was to “reinvent the core idea of the inbox. It’s not this never-ending list. It’s a database you can filter, sort, organize, in the Notion building-block model. It’s like an app you can customize.” It’s not a complete reinvention of the whole email system, just a bunch of new ways to interact with and make sense of everything in that system. That idea has worked awfully well for Notion as a whole, and works for my inbox so far too.

• American Airlines will offer free WiFi to loyalty members from next January.
• It's the last of the traditional "Big Three" US airlines to offer complimentary WiFi.
• Unlike United Airlines, it won't use Elon Musk's Starlink.

American Airlines has become the latest airline to announce free in-flight WiFi.

The airline announced on Tuesday that members of its loyalty program will be able to access high-speed internet sponsored by AT&T.

There's still a wait until next January before the launch, but American says it will have free WiFi available on more planes than any other domestic airline.

It said the service will be available on roughly 90% of its fleet, which numbers nearly 1,000 planes. By the end of 2025, it hopes to equip over 500 regional aircraft with high-speed connectivity from Viasat and Intelsat, ready to roll out in January.

American is the last of the traditional "Big Three" airlines to announce complimentary WiFi.

However, Delta Air Lines only offers it free for loyalty members on most of its domestic flights, requiring payment on long-haul twin-aisle planes.

United Airlines last September announced a deal with Elon Musk's Starlink to roll out free WiFi. It said it would take several years to equip its more than 1,000 planes with the service. United is set to fly its first regional aircraft with Starlink next month and hopes its first mainline plane will be ready before the end of the year.

JetBlue has offered free WiFi for over a decade, while Hawaiian Airlines was the first US carrier to install Starlink.

Musk's satellite service appears to have pushed more airlines to consider the value of offering free, high-speed WiFi.

"While we believe that American Airlines has been generally pleased with Viasat's execution, the satellite provider likely faced significant competition from SpaceX's Starlink," William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma wrote in a Tuesday note.

Business Insider tried it out on Qatar Airways' Starlink launch flight last October and saw speeds of up to 215 megabits per second, faster than most home internet.

Starlink uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites, which provide widescale coverage and, since they're relatively close to Earth, better connectivity.

Viasat and Intelsat, instead, have geostationary satellites, which are much higher above Earth and cover certain areas. However, the former is building up its own constellation of these with a higher capacity, and Intelsat has partnered with OneWeb — a competitor to Starlink.

Last February, Intelsat used a test aircraft connected to OneWeb to attain speeds of 150 megabits per second while flying from Anchorage, Alaska, into the Arctic Circle.

OneWeb's operator, Eutelsat, a French company, saw its stock price soar over 500% last month over fears that Ukraine could face disruptions to its Starlink access given the US's testing relationship with the country.

After paring those gains, Eutelsat stock is up 68% since the start of the year.

Bluesky is updating its app to version 1.100, and the update includes a more comprehensive search page and new chat reactions.

The search page is now known as “Explore,” where you can find trending topics, suggested accounts, and starter packs to jump-start stuff for you to follow on the app. This new Explore page still lets you search from the top, but now, the first thing you see under the search bar are a list of top trends and that may have a tag emphasizing how “hot” or “new” something is.

There’s also a shortcut at the top to edit interests that inform what you see on the Explore page, but you can hide that and adjust your interests later in Settings > Content and media.

As for the chat reactions, you can now hold down on a direct message and select an emoji to react to it with. The feature looks and works similarly to many other chat apps like iMessage.

Previously, holding down on a message brought up a menu on the bottom of the screen to transla …

Read the full story at The Verge.

WordPress.com has launched a new AI-powered site builder in early access that can construct your WordPress webpage, including fully written text, layout, generated images, and more. WordPress.com says the AI website builder can make “beautiful, functional websites in minutes.” However, it can’t yet do the heavy lifting of creating an ecommerce site or one with “complex integrations,” but the company says to stay tuned for such features.

You’ll need a WordPress.com account to start the free trial for the WordPress AI Site Builder, and while you won’t need a credit card on file to have fun with the tool, you will need to get a WordPress.com hosting plan to actually make the site usable, which starts at $18 per month (less if you pay for a whole year or more).

The builder works by inputting prompts into a chatbot, so you can tell it that you need a personal or business site, describe how you want the header to look, what kind of colors you like, etc. WordPress.com says being as specific as possible in your first prompt will get you better results, but the chatbot can ask you for information like your business name and location. It then makes you a site complete with AI-generated headers, images, and text. You can then continue prompting the chatbot to tweak anything from colors, styles, photos, and information that you want included.

I tried it out and made my own fake retro videogame store website. I got a super basic but serviceable site laid out in sections like Discover, Events, and Visit Us. It populated a collection of random AI-generated gameroom images, including one with a girl leaning on a CRT displaying an unknown Tetris-like puzzle game. It also presented a “Sega Saturday Showdown” event that you can RSVP for (coupled with an entirely unrelated image of a woman holding a box of Christmas cookies).

Once the site is built, you can transfer it to WordPress.com’s hosting service, where you can continue working on it manually or return to the AI builder. The tool only works for new WordPress instances and can’t yet be used for pre-existing sites.

The new tool comes as WordPress.com owner Automattic just moved to shed 16 percent of its workforce last week. Automattic also faces a lawsuit brought on by hosting company WP Engine, which offers several tools, including templates, to help you build and manage a site.

Views are the most visible metric on the internet. You can see, in more or less real time, how many views something got on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and most other video platforms. X tracks views for every single thing you post, as does Threads. A view is the universal currency of success — more views, more fun.

But it’s all nonsense. Views are nothing. Views are lies.

You may not need me to remind you of this. We’ve known for years that view counts are meaningless, to the point that Facebook wound up getting sued for aggressively inflating view counts in an effort to convince people to make Facebook videos. Others have written thoughtfully about how stupid view counts are. But we still talk about view counts, view counts are still everywhere, so let’s talk once again about view counts.

A “view,” in reality, is not a universal metric. It’s not really anything. It is whatever a platform wants it to be, which usually has no actual correlation to whether someone actually encountered and experienced a piece of content. You can just make the views whatever you want! And if you don’t like the way the numbers look, make views something else!

Let’s just r …

Read the full story at The Verge.

French satellite network company Eutelsat has been providing Ukraine with much-needed internet access for almost a year with the help of the German government, Reuters reports. Eutelsat’s OneWeb division operates low-orbiting satellites that communicate with terrestrial terminals for internet connectivity — similarly to rival SpaceX’s Starlink network, which has been the primary supplier of satellite internet for Ukraine’s government.

At Eutelsat’s Paris headquarters on Thursday, CEO Eva Berneke revealed that Germany has been providing the funding (of an undisclosed amount) to run the company’s satellite internet access in Ukraine. Right now, Eutelsat has less than a thousand terminals there compared to Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, which has about 50,000 Starlink terminals working in the country, mostly funded by Poland and the US.

However, Berneke says Eutelsat could get 5,000 to 10,000 more into Ukraine “within weeks.” Eutelsat spokesperson Joanna Darlington tells Reuters that they are still under discussion on whether Germany or other financial sources will help with that expansion. Bernerke also said it is in talks with the EU under the EU-backed SpaceRISE consortium, where it and other members are working to build a secure satellite constellation known as IRIS².

A Eutelsat expansion couldn’t come at a more crucial time as the US-Ukraine relationship unravels under the Elon Musk-backed Trump Administration. The European Commission’s defence chief Andrius Kubilius told Reuters at a news conference on Wednesday that, in the event of “unexpected developments,” which Kubilius didn’t elaborate on, there are solutions in place in case they need alternatives to Starlink.

Thunderbird’s developers are planning to compete with Gmail and other email providers by offering paid “pro” tier services, including @thundermail.com email addresses and new services such as an appointment scheduler, file sharing tools, and some “Thunderbird Assist” AI features. You can join a beta waitlist by going to thundermail.com, which is the domain for the email addresses, along with an option for @tb.pro.

Thunderbird managing director Ryan Sipes announced that the services are in the works in a post on the Thunderbird Planning discussion group last Friday. However, it seems pretty early in development, and there are no announced tiers and pricing, though Sipes said there would be both free and paid tiers. “It is our goal to eventually have a similar offering so that a 100 percent open source, freedom-respecting alternative ecosystem is available for those who want it,” said Sipes.

Thunderbird is a long-running open source email client that originally launched in 2003 and was developed alongside Mozilla’s Firefox browser. It lost ground with the rise of Gmail and other web-based email services, but maintained a dedicated user base.

Mozilla ended development of the original Thunderbird client in 2012 and handed it off to a community group. In 2020, after renewed interest and donations, development moved to Mozilla Foundation subsidiary MZLA Technology Corporation, which has been modernizing the codebase and developing mobile clients.

Thunderbird Pro services, including Thundermail, are coming in late to the game with very few details. Unlike Gmail and Outlook, Thunderbird has never offered an email service to go with its email client. In the post, Sipes said, “It is my conviction that all of this should have been a part of the Thunderbird universe a decade ago. But it is better late than never.” It will also face popular Gmail alternatives like ProtonMail and FastMail, but with the general rise of distrust in Big Tech and concerns about privacy, maybe it doesn’t hurt to have more options.

Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, is laying off about 16 percent of its workers. In a memo posted to the company’s website, CEO Matt Mullenweg says he’s making the change to “protect Automattic’s long-term future.”

Before the layoffs, Automattic’s website listed the company as having 1,777 employees. The company has since decreased its employee count to 1,495, meaning around 280 staff members were affected by the job cuts.

Last year, the third-party hosting company WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg after the company blocked WP Engine from WordPress.org’s server and took over its Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin. Mullenweg has stated that the legal battle could go on for years and “could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of WordPress.org.”

In October, Mullenweg offered his employees $30,000 or six months of salary to leave if they didn’t agree with his decision to ignite a public dispute with WP Engine. Automattic shed around 8.4 percent of its workforce after the first round of buyouts. 

“We have reached an important crossroads,” Mullenweg writes in his memo. “While our revenue continues to grow, Automattic operates in a highly competitive market, and technology is evolving at unprecedented levels. To support our customers and products, we must improve our productivity, profitability, and capacity to invest.”

Europol has shut down one of the largest dark web pedophile networks in the world, prompting dozens of arrests worldwide and threatening that more are to follow.

Launched in 2021, KidFlix allowed users to join for free to preview low-quality videos depicting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). To see higher-resolution videos, users had to earn credits by sending cryptocurrency payments, uploading CSAM, or "verifying video titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos."

Europol seized the servers and found a total of 91,000 unique videos depicting child abuse, "many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement," the agency said in a press release.

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Roblox is launching a new type of ad that, if watched, will give players things like in-game currency and power-ups, according to an announcement from the company.

The full-screen video ads, called “Rewarded Video ads,” can be up to 30 seconds long. The ads will be available to buy programmatically “via Google’s advertising solutions and direct buying (Direct IO) in the coming weeks,” Roblox says. 

Owners of Roblox experiences must be at least 18 to show ads, and only public experiences are eligible, according to a page on its creator hub. Roblox says it only shows ads to players that are 13 and older.

The new ads are part of an expansion of Google’s “Immersive Ads” format. Google writes in a separate announcement today that they can show up as “a billboard ad you see driving through a virtual city or an ad on the big screen during a virtual football game.” The company claims these ads “blend naturally into the game environment.” 

Roblox says it will start selling other ad formats through Google’s platform in the coming months, including billboards and entire rows on the Roblox home page.

Vivaldi and Proton have teamed up to make it easier for Vivaldi browser users to privately explore the web without downloading a virtual private network (VPN). Starting today, the free version of Proton VPN is now integrated directly into Vivaldi’s browser, and can be accessed by logging into a Vivaldi account.

The feature is currently only available on the desktop version of the Vivaldi browser. The free version of Proton VPN allows users to connect to servers in five randomly selected countries and provides “medium VPN speed.” Vivaldi browser users can also upgrade to a paid version of Proton VPN starting from $10 per month, which provides faster VPN speeds, the ability to choose which servers to connect to across more than 110 countries, and other additional features.

It isn’t unique for web browsers to have VPN features baked in — Microsoft bolstered its Edge browser with the Edge Secure Network VPN, for example. Proton VPN can also be readily embedded into other web browsers like Chrome and Firefox via downloadable browser extensions. That hurdle, however small, is removed for Vivaldi browsers users, which may make the VPN more accessible to a wider audience.

Vivaldi also said its partnership with Proton was founded in shared “values,” citing that both European companies are “proudly outside the orbit of Silicon Valley’s extractive playbook or China’s state-driven oversight.”

“As governments and users alike reassess their relationship with tech, especially in light of escalating geopolitical tensions, there has been a huge increase in demand for independent, non-aligned, and values-driven solutions,” said Vivaldi CEO Jon Von Tetzchner. “Europe needs European alternatives. In fact, everybody deserves European alternatives. And with Vivaldi and Proton, you’re getting exactly that.”

While Tetzchner says that both Vivaldi and Proton are “politically neutral,” the statement feels like an obvious nod to the fractures appearing between the US and Europe’s relationship since President Donald Trump took office and surrounded himself with leaders of market-dominating Tech Giants. Bundling Vivaldi with privacy-focused freebies could be a viable lure to attract new customers who are already looking to switch to a non-US browser.

I don’t remember when I started using Google. Google just… is. It’s the verb for internet search, it commands 10 times the market share of all its competitors combined, and it is responsible for routing a huge amount of the internet’s traffic.

Almost two years ago, I got out. I signed up for a search engine called Kagi, which charges $10 a month and, in return, promises better search results, no ads, no data collection, and lots of advanced features. I’ve tried a lot of search engines and always ended up back with Google — the results elsewhere just felt somehow worse. This time, whether it’s because Kagi is great or Google is declining or both, I’ve felt no drop-off whatsoever.

I’m still using Kagi, and it’s hard to imagine switching back. It’s now Google that looks bizarre and unfamiliar every time I open it. As Google has become more visual, more chaotic, and consistently less good at simply finding the things I’m looking for, Kagi has stayed simple and straightforward. It is a page full of links, and they’re usually the right ones.

Kagi, as a product, is about three years old, but the company has been around since 2018. It was started by Vladomir P …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Light-based internet project Taara is exiting Alphabet’s “moonshot” incubator X, spinning off into an independent company. Taara’s tech uses lasers to transmit data, and is envisaged as a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink when it comes to connecting rural areas to the internet.

The Financial Times reports that Alphabet will retain a minority stake in Taara, which has also secured funding from Series X Capital. The company currently has two dozen employees and operates in 12 countries, working on everything from connecting the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo to augmenting the congested network at the 2024 Coachella festival. 

“We’ve realised over time that for a good number of the things we create, there’s a lot of benefit to landing just outside of the Alphabet membrane,” said Eric “Astro” Teller, X’s so-called captain of moonshots. “They’re going to be able to get connected quickly to market capital, bring in strategic investors and generally be able to scale faster this way.”

Taara’s current tech involves firing a narrow beam of light from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, with transmission of up to 20 gigabits per second over 20km (almost 12.5 miles) distances. The terminals can be mounted on towers, and are quicker and cheaper to install than laying fiber — especially when you need a signal to reach an island, cross a river, or arrive at some otherwise hard-to-reach location. Last month the company announced that it has condensed its tech into a much more compact chip, which it expects to launch in a product in 2026.

While Taara’s tower-based optical technology works differently to Starlink’s satellites, it’s setting itself up as a rival in the business of connecting rural areas. “We can offer 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it for a fraction of the cost,” founder Mahesh Krishnaswamy told Wired.

Taara itself has its origins in another X project, Loon, which imagined distributing data by shooting lasers around a network of 20-mile-high balloons. Believe it or not, that proved unfeasible in the end, and Loon was wound down in 2021 — just three years after it too “graduated” from Alphabet’s moonshot program. Loon’s lasers were repurposed into Taara’s towers by Krishnaswamy, though the tech also found a third home in Aalyria, another spin-off that focuses on coordinating satellite and airborne mesh networks, and has its own Tightbeam project that sounds similar to Taara.

Google releases a lot of products, but it shuts down a lot of them, too. Some didn’t deserve to be discontinued (we pine for the days of Reader and Inbox), and some probably weren’t long for this world from the start. (What was Google Wave supposed to be, anyway?) The company actually used to shut down products with quarterly “spring cleanings,” but now, it just does so whenever it’s time for another product to be put out to pasture.

Follow along here for all our coverage of everything Google sends to the graveyard.

• Google is officially dumping Assistant for Gemini
• Google’s taking the extra search box out of your search results
• Saluting the Chromecast, one of the great HDMI dongles
• Google is discontinuing the Chromecast line
• Google is ending an experiment that let you annotate search results
• PDF organizer Stack is the latest app to hit the Google graveyard
• Google is killing infinite scroll on search results
• Today I learned there is a messaging service in Google Maps, and now it’s going away
• Google is shutting down developer access to Google Fit APIs.
• The Google One VPN service is heading to the Google graveyard
• Not everyone is losing Google Podcasts after today.
• Google Podcasts’ time is almost up.
• Google Pay replaced Google Wallet — now it’s going away to make room for Google Wallet
• Google Search’s cache links are officially being retired
• Hey Google, I was using that button!
• Google Assistant Driving Mode will shut down in February
• Google removes 17 features from Google Assistant
• Google is losing its Fitbit leaders and laying off hundreds of AR employees
• Google is finally saying goodbye to Google Play Movies & TV
• You can listen to podcasts through Google Podcasts until March 2024.
• Google News hammers the final nail into its magazine subscriptions coffin.
• Google’s whiteboarding app is joining the graveyard
• Google Podcasts is going to the graveyard as YouTube Music takes over
• Gmail’s basic HTML view will go to the Google graveyard in 2024
• Google kills Pixel Pass without ever upgrading subscriber’s phones
• We need Google Reader more than ever.
• Who killed Google Reader?
• Google has reportedly killed its Project Iris augmented reality glasses
• Google sunsets Domains business and shovels it off to Squarespace
• The real Q project.
• RIP Google Currents.
• Google will shut down Currents, the work-focused Google Plus replacement
• Google will shut down Dropcam and Nest Secure in 2024
• Google Stadia is how you shut down a service right
• Google’s Duplex on the Web joins the Google graveyard.
• Google’s worst hardware flop was introduced 10 years ago today
• Google’s handy scrollable Snapshot of your day has disappeared from phones
• A very brief history of every Google messaging app
• Alphabet is shutting down Loon, its internet balloon company
• Google to shut down Android Things, a smart home OS that never took off
• Google discontinues its Google Nest Secure alarm system
• Google kills off app that let you check in on loved ones during an emergency
• Android 11 officially drops support for Google’s Daydream VR
• Google is delaying the shutdown of Chrome apps, but you probably weren’t using them anyway
• Google Plus is officially gone after its mobile apps are rebranded as Google Currents
• These engineers are trying to rescue a ‘Bookbot’ from the Google graveyard
• Google is finally killing off Chrome apps, which nobody really used anyhow
• What we can learn from a decade of dead Google projects
• Google is shutting down its Cloud Print feature in 2020
• Google is open sourcing Cardboard now that the Daydream is dead
• Google Clips is dead
• Google is discontinuing the Daydream View VR headset, and the Pixel 4 won’t support Daydream
• Google finally gives Reader the respect it deserves with an actual gravestone
• Google Hire is the next Google tool to be shut down
• YouTube discontinues private messages to focus on keeping things public
• Google shuts down Nest app for Apple Watch and Wear OS
• How to replace Google’s Trips app
• The YouTube Gaming app is shutting down this week
• Google clarifies Works with Nest shutdown, provides extension on existing connections
• Google’s Nest changes risk making the smart home a little dumber
• Google ends sales of the Pixel 2 and 2 XL
• Google+ is officially deleting consumer data starting April 2nd
• The original Google Hangouts will start to disappear this October
• Google discontinues Chromecast Audio, but you can grab one for $15 while supplies last
• Google halted Chinese data collection program after Dragonfly backlash
• Google will shut down Google+ four months early after second data leak
• Google is ending Play Service support for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
• Google is shutting down Allo
• Google is shutting down Google+ for consumers following security lapse
• Google’s Inbox app is shutting down in March 2019
• Google Goggles is dead; long live Google Lens
• Google is starting to phase out the old Gmail design
• Google is using the impending death of its blob emoji to promote Allo
• Google is finally replacing its bad emoji blobs in Android O
• Google is killing Gchat for good and replacing it with Hangouts
• Google is shutting down Spaces, its experimental group messaging app
• Google confirms the end of its modular Project Ara smartphone
• Google will end support for Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux
• Google will shut down Picasa this spring
• Google takes the ‘last step’ to shut down its failed social network Buzz
• Google Reader to shut down July 1st
• Google discontinues Listen podcast app, Google Apps for Teams, and Google Video for Business
• Google’s latest ‘spring cleaning’ moves all video content to YouTube, kills iGoogle and Symbian Search app
• Google Wave is officially dead starting today
• Google’s spring cleaning ends support for BlackBerry Sync, Picasa plug-ins for iPhoto, and more
• Google kills off more experimental services, including Wave, Gears, and Knol
• Google Buzz to shut down in a few weeks, Google Labs dies today

Lately, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has taken an aggressive posture toward Europe. He has called for the United States to exit NATO, a strategic alliance that has been the bedrock of trans-Atlantic cooperation since the end of World War II. Musk has also championed right-wing populism that seeks to topple existing governments on the continent.

And then there's Musk's increasingly antagonistic attitude toward Ukraine, a country viewed by many Europeans as a bulwark against further Russian aggression. This threatens the availability of a vital link in Ukraine's military, Starlink.

Musk's world-class satellite technology has provided lifesaving connectivity to citizens and soldiers in Ukraine. It has increased the country's offensive capabilities. And yet Musk could shut off his Starlink service anywhere in the world with an email.

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PayPal’s Honey browser extension has been lauded for years as an easy way to find coupons online. But some are calling it a “scam” after a deep dive from YouTuber MegaLag, who accused Honey of “stealing money from influencers.”

The video shines a light on Honey’s use of last-click attribution, an approach to online shopping referrals that gives credit for a sale to the owner of the last affiliate cookie in line before checkout. As MegaLag’s video tells it, Honey takes that credit by swapping its tracking cookie in for others’ when you interact with it.

The company has issued statements saying that it follows “industry rules and practices” like last-click attribution. But creators who may have missed out on money because of it aren’t happy. Some YouTube channels Legal Eagle and GamersNexus are now suing.

Below, you’ll find all our coverage of the controversy.

• Google changes Chrome extension policies following the Honey link scandal
• GamersNexus is leading a new class action lawsuit against PayPal.
• YouTuber Legal Eagle is suing over PayPal’s Honey extension
• Honey’s deal-hunting browser extension is accused of ripping off customers and YouTubers

Two initiatives to create a more open web, where users are in control of their own digital identities and data, may be coming together. At SXSW 2025, entrepreneur Frank McCourt, whose Project Liberty is developing open internet infrastructure (and is throwing its hat in the ring as a potential buyer for TikTok), announced that his […]

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Surf, the new app from Flipboard for browsing the open social web, is expanding its support for Bluesky’s social network. On Monday, the company announced a new version of its beta software (dubbed “Blue Wave”) which allows users to log into the app using their Bluesky credentials and then see all their Bluesky feeds in […]

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