The internet came to life 50 years ago this week, with a simple message sent from the University of California, Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute. The system crashed only two characters into the transmission of the word “login”: SRI received only “lo” — “as in ‘lo and behold!’” in the words of UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock. The UCLA terminal ...

I hope Alphabet Inc. has a plan. The Google parent company announced that it would spend $2.1 billion to buy Fitbit Inc., a pioneer in the fitness-tracking gadgets that haven’t proved to be a lasting category of consumer electronics. Google has now spent billions of dollars developing homegrown hardware such as its Pixel smartphones and buying all or parts of ...

China has a standard road map for fixing state-owned giants that have gone off the rails: Create an even more inflated behemoth through a mega-merger, in the hope that the stronger business will be able to prop up the weaker one until the storm blows over. It’s a playbook that’s been followed in steel, shipping, energy and rolling stock — ...