US telecoms giant Verizon Communications is to buy Yahoo's search and advertising operations for $5bn (£3.8bn), according to media reports. The two firms were reported on Friday to be in exclusive talks over a possible deal. US internet firm Yahoo announced in February that it was looking at "strategic alternatives" for its core internet business. Verizon declined to comment on the reports. A formal announcement is expected on Monday before US markets open for trading.

There was a time when Yahoo was the internet company that Google is now. What happened?

It’s more than double what has been previously reported and far more than the company is saying. After the Verizon VZ 0.51% deal was announced on Monday, the Internet erupted in outrage that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer could collect as much as $55 million. That’s the figure Yahoo YHOO -0.15% stated in April that Mayer could collect if the company were sold and more-than enough to get observers who think Mayer has not done a great job to declare her pay unfair, and another sign that corporate compensation is corrupt.

Nearly every month, Verizon Fios defends its title as the fastest ISP in Netflix's speed index. From time to time, another ISP will unseat the champion, but the change never lasts long. Of course, some have argued that such speed index tests are inaccurate and grossly over-simplified. However, it's hard to argue against the fact that Verizon Fios is a name synonymous with internet that's fast as hell. How fast is that exactly? Well, the top plan currently offered is 500 Mbps both up and down.

Verizon has told its field technicians in Pennsylvania that they can be fired if they try to fix broken copper phone lines. Instead, employees must try to replace copper lines with a device that connects to Verizon Wireless’s cell phone network. This directive came in a memo from Verizon to workers on September 20. “Failure to follow this directive may result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal,” the memo said. It isn't clear whether this policy has been applied to Verizon workers outside of Pennsylvania.

As thousands of Verizon Wireless customers complain about skyrocketing bills for data usage, some small businesses have also been clobbered. And when businesses get hit, the bills are sometimes staggering. In Greater Cleveland, David Smith of Horizon Education Centers is staring at a Verizon bill for data usage for $20,291.94. That's for one month. For data overages. The entire bill was for more than $23,000.

A small island community is up in arms over Verizon billing its volunteer fire company $73,000 to have equipment moved off land on which the department is building a new firehouse. And then there are the ponies.

Verizon is charging you more for the right to buy a new phone.

Verizon is being taken to court after allegedly failing to provide adequate fiber services to New York City. The telecoms giant apparently has failed to fulfill a contract signed back in 2008 to give city residents the option to sign up for fiber-optic FiOS service by 2014. Now it is 2017, according to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city is "done waiting."

The next chapter in Yahoo’s strange journey from cornerstone of the early internet to aged Verizon subsidiary is a bold rebranding.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer continues to stack up piles of cash, despite her veritable failure to rescue the company from a pile of its own rot. After numerous setbacks, including two massive security breaches and dwindling ad revenue, Mayer is set to make about $186 million as a result of the company’s sale to Verizon, new SEC documents show.

A U.S. appeals court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s so-called net neutrality rule barring internet service providers from slowing or blocking rivals’ content. The court’s ruling last year was a triumph for companies such as Netflix Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. It was a substantial setback for AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., which lost the opportunity to slow or even block the transmission of disfavored content.

Lies and hyperbole are certainly no strangers to either side of the net neutrality debate, but as the FCC moves to kill net neutrality -- net neutrality opponents have taken things to an entirely new level. FCC boss Ajit Pai's speech last week unveiling the move was utterly packed with claims that had already been painstakingly debunked over the last decade (read: lies), from the absurd claim that gutting consumer protections would somehow help consumers in the Comcast era, to the similarly untrue claim that net neutrality killed broadband investment.

Verizon continues to boot heavy users on the company's "unlimited" wireless data plans off of the Verizon network. Users over at Howard Forums (hat tip, BGR) note that the target appears to be largely rural customers on partner carriers of Verizon's LTE in rural America program (LTEiRA), which provides smaller rural carriers spectrum and technology access in exchange for extending Verizon's cellular reach in these markets.

A study by Maplight indicates that for every one comment submitted to the FCC on net neutrality (and there have been roughly 5 million so far), the telecom industry has spent $100 in lobbying to crush the open internet. The group found that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) have spent $572 million on attempts to influence the FCC and other government agencies since 2008.

The names, addresses and phone numbers of millions of Verizon customers were publicly exposed online by one of the company's vendors. In some cases, security pins were also exposed by Nice Systems, a Verizon vendor, according to software security firm UpGuard, which uncovered the leak.

Verizon Wireless users over at Reddit have been complaining this week that the company has started throttling their connections to Netflix without informing them of the change. To be clear the throttling is less than you'll see in many instances, with users saying their speeds on Verizon Wireless are capped at around 10 Mbps when both streaming Netflix content -- or running Netflix's simple Fast.com speedtest.

Yesterday, we reported that Verizon Wireless appeared to be throttling Netflix traffic, — and today, the company seems to have come clean. In a statement provided to Ars Technica and The Verge, Verizon implicitly admitted to capping the traffic, blaming the issue on a temporary video optimization test. “We've been doing network testing over the past few days to optimize the performance of video applications on our network," a Verizon Wireless spokesperson said. “The testing should be completed shortly. The customer video experience was not affected.”

Imagine if you took every single gripe you've had with Verizon over the past five years — the time it blocked Nexus 7 tablets for five months; the time it forced you to pay $20 per month for tethering; the time it tried to make you use a mobile wallet app called "ISIS" — and finally put your foot down. For a year, you spend free moments holed up in library stacks, speaking with experts, and researching and writing a sprawling legal complaint about the company's many, many misdeeds.

Verizon opened an internal investigation on Thursday after discovering that a man wore company gear while marching at the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend. CEO Lowell McAdam will personally oversee the probe, he said in a companywide email that marks his first public comments on the controversy.