The New York Times

Google has launched a cool new internet thing.

SAN FRANCISCO — There are video games that go viral overnight, causing people to coop themselves up in their homes for days to play.But the opposite has happened with Pokémon Go, a free smartphone game that has soared to the top of the download charts: It has sent people into streets and parks, onto beaches and even 

At the age of 21, David Pakman started a little Massachusetts community radio talk program. While the young broadcaster got his show syndicated on a few public radio stations, it was a YouTube channel he began in 2009, “The David Pakman Show,” that opened up his progressive political commentary to a whole new digital audience. The show has since amassed 353,000 subscribers, and roughly half of its revenue now comes from the ads that play before his videos.

Republican senators moved Thursday to dismantle landmark internet privacy protections for consumers in the first decisive strike against telecommunications and technology regulations created during the Obama administration, and a harbinger of further deregulation.The measure passed in a 50-to-48 vote largely along party lines.

SAN FRANCISCO — The big banks and Silicon Valley are waging an escalating battle over your personal financial data, including the amount you spent on dinner last week and how much you are paying for your mortgage.Technology start-ups like Mint and Betterment have been building services that pull together your bank account and credit card records — after you supply the passwords.But now big banks are making a concerted push to set new restrictions on how technology companies can get access to this personal financial data, in some cases refusing to pass along information like the fees and int

India is fast becoming the new battleground for global technology and telecommunications giants, as Facebook, Vodafone and others vie to connect the country’s population of 1.2 billion to the internet.The fight took another turn on Monday when Vodafone, a British car

One secret to longevity as a pundit is to issue predictions that can’t be easily checked. So here’s one for the time capsule: Two hundred years from now, give or take, the robot-people of Earth will look back on the early years of the 21st century as the beginning of a remarkable renaissance in art and culture.That may sound unlikely to many of us in the present.

• Whatever the outcome of the latest proposed mergers and acquisitions in the media industry, a clear winner has already emerged, and it’s not even a party to any of the deals: Netflix, the streaming television pioneer.

Online streaming may be the music industry’s biggest source of growth. But as Sony is learning, when the business arrangements behind it are made public it can expose serious rifts. 

In the latest example of the music industry’s rush over online consumer data, the music streaming service Pandora Media announced Tuesday that it had bought Next Big Sound, a six-year-old company that tracks the popularity of songs online and in social networks. Pandora’s acquisition follows other deals that have gradually consolidated the world of data-tracking in music.