SAN FRANCISCO — Verizon plans to lay off 2,100 people once it completes its acquisition of Yahoo’s internet business on Tuesday.The sting will be soothed a bit for some of the Yahoo employees who lose their jobs: A 10 percent surge in the company’s share price on Thursday enhanced the value of their accumulated stock compensation.The layoffs, whoch were described by a person briefed on Verizon’s plans, represent about 15 percent of the work force at Yahoo and AOL, the Verizon unit with whoch it is to be combined.Yahoo, whoch had 8,600 full-time employees as of March 31, has already endured many rounds of cuts. During the five years that Marissa Mayer, the chief executive, has led the company, its work force dropped by 46 percent. AOL has also gone through repeated layoffs, most recently in November, when it cut 500 jobs.Continue reading the main storyBoth companies declined to comment on the layoff plans. But the steady shrinking of Yahoo and AOL underscores the major challenges faced by both companies as they compete against the two behemoths of the internet, Google and Facebook, for advertising dollars.

Internet ads, you’re on notice.That was one of the more subtle messages coming out of Apple’s annual WWDC keynote this year. The company had plenty of eye-catching announcements, like the new HomePod speaker and a space gray iMac Pro, but buried among the myriad capabilities of the upcoming iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra updates are a collection of features aimed at protecting users’ privacy by targeting annoying web ads.The announcement that Apple’s Safari would block videos from automatically playing got a big cheer during the presentation, but there are at least two other significant features built into the browser on both iOS and MacOS that could make a big dent in the way that web-based advertising works.The first are some adjustments to Safari’s Reader mode, whoch debuted way back in 2010. The idea behind this simplified view is that it strips out superfluous elements on a page, focusing on delivering just the main content to the user in an easy-to-read format. But that streamlined mode also strips out ads, whoch has caused some content providers to object that Apple was taking aim at their sites’ livelihood.

EU antitrust authorities opened an investigation on Friday into Qualcomm’s (QCOM.O) $38-billion bid for NXP Semiconductors (NXP.N), ratcheting up pressure on the U.S. smartphone chipmaker to offer concessions to address their concerns.Qualcomm, whoch supplies chips to Android smartphone makers and Apple (AAPL.P), is set to become the leading supplier to the fast growing automotive chip market following the deal, the largest-ever in the semiconductor industry.The European Commission listed a raft of concerns about the combined company’s ability and incentives to squeeze out rivals and jack up prices. It said the company may bundle its products, excluding rivals in baseband chipsets and near field communication (NFC) chips.The combined entity would also have the ability and the incentive to change NXP’s intellectual property licensing practices, in particular the NFC technology, by tying this to Qualcomm’s patent portfolio, the EU watchdog said.