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Today’s the day Disney announces its $60 billion deal to buy the majority of 21st Century Fox. Expect the press release this morning. The conventional wisdom is that the deal, which would give Disney control of Fox’s movie studio and TV studio but not its broadcast network or Fox News, is aimed at competing with Netflix. It would also represent a very big bet on TV sports for Disney, which already owns ESPN. And it puts Hulu’s future in question. [Wall Street Journal]
The Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission is voting to repeal net neutrality this morning. The FCC’s chief technology officer, Eric Burger, who was appointed in October by Republican Chairman Ajit Pai, warned yesterday in an internal email that the No. 1 issue with the repeal of the Obama-era regulations is concern that internet service providers will block or throttle specific websites. Here’s how to watch the vote live. [Margaret Harding McGill]
Target is acquiring Instacart competitor Shipt for $550 million to fight back against Amazon. Shipt partners with a network of brick-and-mortar grocery chains to pick orders off of their shelves and deliver them to customer’s doors on the same day they are ordered. Target will offer same-day delivery from half of its stores by summer. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
One word: Lasers. That seems to be the future foreseen by Apple, which is investing nearly $400 million in Finisar, one of its suppliers, which makes the laser chips essential to 3-D, along with depth- and proximity sensing, used in Face ID, iPhone X and AirPods.[Dan Frommer / Recode]
Was 2017 the sorriest year ever? It was certainly a big year for apologies: In this four-minute video, the New York Times wraps up apologies from individuals like Harvey Weinstein, Travis Kalanick and Kathy Griffin to companies like Equifax, Pepsi and United Airlines. [David Botti / The New York Times]
Top stories from Recode
Global internet speeds got 30 percent faster in 2017.
Here are the countries with the fastest internet.
As Uber wraps up its driver improvement campaign, its head of driver product is leaving the company.
Aaron Schildkrout joined Uber in 2015.
Twitter’s hilarious new ad addresses one of its biggest problems — that Twitter is too hard to use.
Twitter launched two new digital ads with comedian Romesh Ranganathan.
Patreon has changed its mind about a new payments plan that everyone hated.
But it has already lost some users, says CEO Jack Conte.
Netflix knows what you want to watch, and the creators of “Godless” love it.
Executive producer Steven Soderbergh and writer/director Scott Frank talk about how the new western came together on Recode Media.
This is cool
The arrival of Drew Magary’s annual Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog has become a cherished holiday tradition for some of us. And around this time every year, it’s fun to re-read the classic suite of Tom Shales’ reviews of Kathie Lee Gifford’s nightmarish before-Christmas TV specials. Here they are.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
