Internet

Today in Tech: News around the Web

A round-up of the companies, deals, and trends that made headlines.

Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We've assembled the weekend's most newsworthy bits below.

"The world doesn't need another platform." -- Google VP of Engineering Andy Rubin on Windows MORE

Net neutrality for wireless? Don't count on it.

Unrestricted access rules for wireless networks would hurt users more than help them. They just don't realize it.

Earlier this week, Google and Verizon brokered a compromise on the definition -- or at least, their definition -- of net neutrality, a set of rules that ideally, would ensure that no company could place data-access restrictions on Web content, sites, platforms, and associated equipment. The deal itself sparked controversy over whose interests MORE

Municipalities continue to embarrass themselves for Google Fiber

The point, I hope, is that Google wants to shame the cable and phone companies into providing faster Internet service.

Google today released a progress report on their Google Fiber for Communities project.

Conclusion: People want cheap Gigabit Fiber to the home really, really badly.

So much, in fact, they are willing to do just about anything:

Google's (GOOG) motivations are simple: Faster Internet equates to more time online and more Google advertising.

Techmate: Facebook CEO responds to privacy concerns [video]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks to Jon Fortt about how he has tried to simplify the social network's privacy settings and mollify critics.

(AAPL) (MSFT) (GOOG) (YHOO)

Facebook vs. Google: Game On

Facebook's new features are positioning it to organize the Web. Can it best Google?

Can Facebook out-Google Google? The competition is mounting between the Web's two largest destinations as Facebook unleashes a string of new features. Set to debut at Facebook's April 21 developers conference, they may lay the groundwork for reorganizing the Internet according to the relationships between people instead of pages—with massive implications for both search and advertising.

Back when MORE

The Facebook of dieting

SparkPeople helps millions of dieters lose weight --  but not from their wallets.

Today people turn to social networks for help with everything from finding a job to landing a date. So it's only natural that virtual communities would crop up around another of life's big challenges: losing weight.

But the usual suspects aren't the ones leading the way in convening calorie counters online. That title belongs to SparkPeople.com, a free website MORE

Broken China

The burgeoning superpower keeps sabotaging its relationships with the outside world.

By Paul Smalera, writer

Google has long been embarrassed by having to restrict its search results in China and promised to stop the practice as soon as it could. The company agreed to self-censor in 2006 as a devil's bargain to gain access to the Chinese market. But after last year's successful and major hacking of its Chinese operations MORE

How Facebook overtook Google to be the top spot on the Internet

What the Hitwise numbers do -- and don't -- tell us about the coming showdown between the Internet's largest web properties.

Facebook has dethroned Google! Sort of! Well, ok, not really. For the week ending March 13, the social networking site got more traffic than its competitor in the United States, according to a blog post by industry tracker Hitwise. But be careful how you slice your numbers. While many pundits MORE

The business case for a national broadband policy

That thump you heard in the middle of the night, was the 376-page National Broadband Plan finally being dropped (you can get your very own copy or just scan through the executive summary here).

Not pulling any political punches, broadband is compared to electricity in the conclusion to the report crafted by Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski and his team. It reads:

In 1938, President Roosevelt traveled to Gordon Military College in MORE

AOL's Tim Armstrong turns skeptics into believers

If new AOL CEO Tim Armstrong keeps talking, the company just might reemerge Phoenix-like on the Internet landscape. At least that's what the results of audience polling showed at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference Thursday.

Fortune's David Kirkpatrick opened the interview by asking whether AOL would slowly "run out of juice, remain profitable but not a significant industry force,  or return to health as a major Internet player." Using devices provided by MORE