Microsoft announced Wednesday it would let go up to 1,850 employees and a Finnish union called it the end of the company's smartphone manufacturing business, bought from Finnish telecom equipment maker Nokia.

U.S. firms Netflix and Amazon face quotas for European movies and television shows under new Brussels proposals unveiled Wednesday that also aim to lift bloc-wide barriers for Internet shoppers.

The plan is the latest step towards what Brussels calls a digital single market, in which the European Union's 500 million people will no longer be blocked from buying goods and services more cheaply abroad online.

Google on Tuesday unveiled redesigned ad products aimed at catching eyes on mobile devices and enticing people with nearby offerings at just the right moments.

Changes set to take place later this year include expanding space for text ads and making headlines more prominent.

Twitter announced Tuesday it was easing its 140-character limit for tweets, allowing users to add links, attachments and some other features within the short messages.

The move comes as Twitter's efforts to increase its user base and engagement have been sputtering, raising questions about its growth trend.

Facebook on Monday said it was making changes aimed at keeping political bias out of its "trending" stories list even though an internal investigation revealed no evidence it was happening.

Chinese authorities are exploring new ways of imposing controls on the Internet, state-run media cited experts as saying Monday, after reports said state-owned enterprises may be encouraged to take stakes in video streaming websites.

The Communist country restricts access to foreign websites including Google, Facebook and Twitter with a vast control network dubbed the Great Firewall of China, and under President Xi Jinping it has tightened its grip on broadcast, print and online media.

Google on Friday showed off a modular Android-powered smartphone it said is on track to hit the market next year.

Word that Project Ara was moving ahead, and not shelved as some had speculated during the past year, came on the final day of Google's annual developers conference in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View.

Google said Thursday it feared for free speech if France succeeded in forcing it to apply the right to have information about a person removed from its search engines not just in France, but worldwide.

Americans are getting comfortable with new "sharing economy" services like Uber for ride-sharing and Airbnb for lodging, a survey showed Thursday.

Some 15 percent of Americans have used a ride-hailing service such as Uber or Lyft and 11 percent have booked a stay with an online service such as Airbnb or HomeAway, according to the Pew Research Center survey.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg meets Wednesday with leading U.S. conservatives to try to head off a storm over allegations that the social network suppressed right-leaning political viewpoints.