Internet News.
The web platform, browsers, protocols and the policy fights that shape the open internet. We decode the standards, platform changes and legal battles that determine what the web can do and who controls it.
Internet
California's AB 1709 Would Strip Under-16 Feeds of Algorithms
AB 1709 cleared the California legislature and now sits on Governor Newsom's desk, and it would bar any account held by a user under 16 from getting a recommendation algorithm, personalized feed, or follow/like-based ranking starting in 2027, with EFF pushing hard for a veto before the September 30 deadline.
Internet
PayPal Stock Drops 13% as Stripe-Advent's $50B Bid Collapses
PayPal shares fell about 13% on August 28 after Stripe and Advent International walked away from a roughly $50 billion buyout, unwinding weeks of takeover-premium gains and putting PayPal back on its own for a turnaround.
Internet
Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake America for US Users
Google Maps now shows US users "Lake America" instead of "Lake Ontario," matching a federal database update after Trump's August 27 executive order; Canadian users still see Lake Ontario.
Internet
Amazon Is Shutting Down Mechanical Turk After 21 Years
Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk and SageMaker Ground Truth on September 30, 2026, ending the 21 year old crowdsourcing platform that helped invent AI training data work, a market now run by Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific.
Internet
Meta Pays $16.68B in Biggest Child Safety Settlement Ever
Meta will pay up to $16.68 billion, the largest child safety settlement in US history, over claims that Facebook and Instagram's design choices harmed teens. Starting now, teens face a two-hour daily cap and a midnight to 6 a.m. blackout on both apps.
Internet
Cloudflare Cuts DNS Cache Memory 56%, Frees 100TB Fleet-Wide
Cloudflare rewrote the data structures behind its 1.1.1.1 DNS cache, shrinking each entry from 953 to 420 bytes and freeing about 100 terabytes of memory across its server fleet.
Internet
YouTube Doubles Watch-Hour Bar for New Partner Creators
Starting February 1, 2027, new applicants to YouTube's Partner Program will need 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days to earn ad revenue, exactly double today's bar, while the 1,000-subscriber floor stays the same.
Internet
Google Paid $10M for Spirit Airlines' Emails and Chats
Google won a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' internal business data, agreeing to pay $10 million for roughly 100 million emails and 500 million Teams chats to train its AI models. The airline's passenger and loyalty records are excluded from the deal.
Internet
Fusion centers are monitoring anti-Flock social accounts
Law enforcement bulletins published August 16 show at least seven state fusion centers and FBI headquarters tracking Instagram and TikTok accounts that organize against Flock license plate cameras. The documents name individual accounts, count cities joining this week's national protest, and tell officers to increase patrols around the cameras.
Internet
France's top court kills the under-15 social media ban
France's Conseil constitutionnel censured Article 1 of the under-15 social media ban on August 14, 2026, weeks before it was due to take effect. The reasoning matters far beyond France: a rule aimed only at children forces every adult to prove their age too, and Parliament never wrote down how that proof would work.
Internet
RFC 10023 puts a for-sale sign in your domain’s DNS
You can now advertise that a domain is for sale with a single DNS record. RFC 10023, published in July 2026 by Marco Davids of SIDN Labs and registered with IANA, reserves _for-sale as a leaf node name and defines the TXT syntax that goes with it. Around 250,000 records are already live, and it is the first IETF-registered underscored record to carry commercial intent rather than technical policy.
Internet
USA Today Co. Turns to Palantir as Search Traffic Craters
USA Today Co., the largest newspaper chain in the United States, told investors on Thursday that it has hired Palantir to analyze its reader data, after average monthly unique visitors fell from 180 million to 158 million in a single quarter.
Internet
EU age check spec mandates hardware-bound attestation
Maintainers of the EU's age verification app confirmed that binding credentials to device hardware is a fixed requirement, not a negotiable implementation detail. The binding is cryptographically strong, but the age claim it protects is checked entirely on the user's own device, which is where the app has already been bypassed twice.
Internet
EU AI labelling rules go live today, minus the big one
Article 50 of the EU AI Act applies from today, so chatbots must identify themselves and deepfakes must be disclosed. The machine-readable marking rule for generative systems already on the market slipped to 2 December, which is the part most builders actually needed.
Internet
FTC sues Hims & Hers over health data sent to Meta, Snap
The FTC, Utah and California sued Hims & Hers on July 29 over advertising pixels that sent health-page activity to Meta, Snap, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit and X, plus claims the company billed for prescriptions before the promised clinician consult.
Internet
Warner Bros. Sues Amazon Over an HBO Max Exec's Term Contract
Warner Bros. Discovery sued Amazon on July 21 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, saying it induced HBO Max marketing executive Pia Barlow to break a contract that runs to October 31, 2027. California voided non-competes decades ago, but fixed-term deals survived, and a 2021 appellate ruling against Netflix is the precedent Warner is leaning on.
Internet
Kalshi Threatens Netflix Over Prediction Games Trailer
Kalshi sent Netflix a cease and desist on Friday demanding it pull the trailer for Instadocs: The Prediction Games, arguing a May 2025 trading screenshot was cut into July 2026 Las Vegas footage to imply a sports trade in Nevada, where a court order bars its sports markets.
Internet
Microsoft Blames 365 Outage on a Route-Pulling Maintenance Bug
Microsoft's preliminary post incident review says a defect in its automated maintenance change process marked extra network devices as part of a maintenance job, so more IP routes were withdrawn than intended and West US lost connectivity to the wide-area network for five hours on July 23.
Internet
India Orders GitHub to Pull Jack Dorsey's Bitchat Code
India's cyber crime agency gave GitHub three hours to remove three Bitchat repositories, citing communication it cannot lawfully intercept during the Delhi protests. The order cannot reach the app itself: Bitchat relays messages phone to phone over Bluetooth, with no server to block and no account to trace.
Internet
Microsoft 365 Down: SharePoint Is 78% of the Complaints
Microsoft 365 began failing for thousands of users just after 10:30 a.m. ET on July 23, 2026, peaking at 2,403 Downdetector reports against a baseline of 29. SharePoint accounts for 78% of the complaints, which points the failure at the content layer beneath Teams and Office for the web rather than at Teams itself.
Internet
The Teen Suing Meta Over Addiction Just Dropped the Case
A Florida teenager known as R.K.C. voluntarily dismissed all claims against Meta on July 22, 2026, five days before a Los Angeles jury trial, and Meta says it paid nothing. YouTube, TikTok and Snap had each settled out of the same case first, leaving Meta the last defendant standing.
Internet
Firefox Halves Its Release Cycle to Two Weeks
Mozilla is moving Firefox Desktop and Android from four-week to two-week major releases starting with Firefox 155 on September 1, 2026. Firefox 154 on August 18 is the last monthly update. Mozilla calls it an experiment, and Chrome and Edge got there first.
Internet
The Anti-AI Browser Backlash Is Fueling DuckDuckGo's Surge
As Big Tech races to stuff AI into every browser, DuckDuckGo says US installs jumped 30% and traffic to its no-AI search page tripled, while Vivaldi doubles down on a browse-without-AI stance, revealing a real market for AI-free browsing.
Internet
Web Bot Auth: The IETF Standard to Verify AI Agents
Web Bot Auth is a Cloudflare-led IETF standard that cryptographically verifies which bot or AI agent is really behind an HTTP request. Built on RFC 9421 message signatures, it lets sites allow trusted agents and block spoofed scrapers, and is already live at Cloudflare's edge.
Internet
Edge 150 Adds Focusgroup and PWA Origin Migration
Microsoft Edge 150 ships the HTML focusgroup attribute, Web App Origin Migration for PWAs, and Promise-returning scroll methods, quietly handing developers keyboard-navigation and app-migration primitives that used to require custom code.
Internet
Brave Origin: A Paid Browser That Strips Out Crypto and AI
Brave has launched Brave Origin, a paid version of its browser that removes the built-in crypto wallet, AI assistant, and rewards system, betting that some users will pay for a stripped-down browser that is just a privacy-focused browser.
Internet
Firefox 153 Bets on Floating Windows and a Built-In VPN
Mozilla's new Firefox roadmap, headlined by version 153, adds the ability to pop any web content into an always-on-top floating window and a free VPN built directly into the browser, a productivity-and-privacy pitch aimed at Chrome refugees.
Internet
Chrome's Soft Navigations API Fixes SPA Web Vitals
Chrome is bringing a Soft Navigations API that finally lets single-page apps measure Core Web Vitals per in-app route change, closing a years-old blind spot where SPAs looked fast on the first load and untracked forever after.
Internet
ECMAScript 2026 Is Finalized: What the 17th Edition Means
ECMAScript 2026, the 17th edition of the standard behind JavaScript, has been finalized. It ratifies the features that cleared the TC39 process this cycle and that browser engines largely shipped ahead of the spec, keeping the language on its steady once-a-year release rhythm.
Internet
Edge 150 Now Lets You Sign In With a Google Account
Microsoft Edge 150 now lets you sign in with a Google account on Windows and macOS, while dropping AI history search and the master password and moving to a two-week release cadence from Edge 152.