Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Dropbox are known for keeping a tight rein on employee stock, essentially prohibiting private share sales of the type that were quite popular among pre-IPO companies just a few years ago.

Some say the clampdown is unfair to employees. Others say it’s a prudent way to keep a handle on ownership and prevent the spread of confidential company information.

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Silicon Valley has long prided itself on a libertarian attitude towards government. But in truth, the tech industry has always had a big stake in government policies—it was the Department of Defense, after all, that led the creation of the Internet—and its lobbying presence in Washington has grown dramatically in recent years.

The industry now ranks fourth in industry lobbying ...

As the rise of video streaming vastly increases the amount of data carried across the Internet, major telecom companies are developing a range of back-end service offerings in the hopes of becoming one-stop shops for Internet media companies that need seamless delivery of their content.

Verizon is aggressively building its Verizon Digital Media Services unit, which it created following ...

If Larry Page stopped being Google’s CEO today, Sundar Pichai would undoubtedly be his replacement.

The Internet has changed just about every industry, making it easy to order ramen from across the globe and hail a car from your phone. But it hasn't altered one fundamental truth: When your sink is leaking, you want to find a plumber nearby who can fix it straight away.

In 2012, repair and maintenance alone was a $174 billion industry, according to the U.S. Census ...

Netflix announced today that it wants to be in the Chelsea Handler business. And in picking up Ms. Handler in a multi-pronged deal that includes some version of her topical E! talk show, Netflix sent another message: it’s moving closer to being a real-time television network.

As the world awaits Alibaba’s public offering with a fervor not seen since the Nintendo 64, the iPhone and the birth of Christ, it’s hard to remember that just a few years ago Chinese companies were toxic.

A series of scandals dogged Chinese stocks starting in 2011, when software maker Longtop Financial Technologies was caught cooking the books. Fraud allegations at other companies ...

AMC Networks, which has vaulted into the first tier of TV programmers in recent years with shows such as “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” is preparing to break from the long-established cable television business model and launch several subscription video websites, according to two people who have been involved in the project.

The first site is expected to launch later ...

When the ride-dispatching company Uber announced recently that it had raised $1.2 billion in a deal that valued that company at $18.2 billion, a casual observer might have assumed that the company would need to be worth that much or more for the investors to make money.

In fact, an analysis of Uber’s multiple rounds of financing shows that if the company were sold for anything over ...

As ad agencies descend on Cannes this week for the annual advertising festival, the mortal threat they face from Google and other digital media firms is growing more frightening every day.

The latest battle for control of digital advertising is over an arcane set of technologies for what’s known in the industry as “ad attribution.” Google announced in early May that it had ...

San Francisco is starting to feel crowded with Chinese Internet companies. This week I learned that Cheetah Mobile, a Chinese maker of mobile security software, has an office just around the corner from The Information. Alibaba is entering our physical and virtual environs too: It’s opening a new office in San Francisco and this week launched 11 Main, a new website targeted at U.S. ...