Web Search Portals & Other Information Services NAICS 519290

Jan 16, 2026 - Proposal Would Require Tech Giants To Pay Increasing Power Costs

• President Donald Trump and the governors of several US Northeastern states agreed to push for an emergency wholesale electricity auction that would compel information technology companies to effectively fund new power plants, according to Bloomberg News. The plan is intended to address growing tension over how the nation can supply electricity to power-hungry data centers without also increasing utility bills for homes and other businesses. President Trump and the governors urged the PJM Interconnection regional transmission organization to hold an auction so data center owners could bid on 15-year power purchase agreements in what would be a stark departure from how the grid operator normally operates. PJM normally ensures that it has enough power supplies to meet its needs through capacity auctions held in advance of when the power is actually needed. Under that system, power plant owners are paid to be available to produce electricity in the upcoming delivery year, which normally begins about three years after the auction is held. The proposed emergency auction could support $15 billion in new power plants, according to a US Department of Energy (DOE) fact sheet on the agreement. The data centers would be required to pay for the new generation built for them, whether they use the power or not, DOE said.
• Agentic search, chatbots that summarize information from across the web, could replace traditional search engines as the default gateway to the internet, according to MIT Technology Review. AI agentic search tools like Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s SearchGPT aim to retrieve and repackage information from third-party websites. They return a short digest to users along with links to a handful of sources, ranging from research papers to Wikipedia articles and YouTube transcripts. The AI system does the reading and writing, but the information comes from outside. AI search threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy if it becomes the primary portal to the web, according to MIT Technology Review. News Corp, the parent company of media outlets including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in October 2025 for infringing copyrighted content. News Corp alleges that Perplexity copies news articles, analyses, and opinions "on a massive scale."

• Hacking groups associated with China, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and over a dozen other countries have been using Alphabet’s Gemini chatbot to assist with their operations, according to Google’s Threat Intelligence Group. Gemini is helpful in supporting several phases of an attack, including research, creating malicious content, and planning evasion strategies, according to the Threat Intelligence Group, but hackers have not yet been able to use Gemini to generate new attack methods. Hacking groups from Iran and China have used Gemini the most, relying on the chatbot for a wide variety of tasks from researching military targets to malicious scripting. More than 20 Chinese groups and 10 Iranian groups were observed using Gemini.
• Web search portal and other information service industry employment and average wages for nonsupervisory employees increased slightly during the first eight months of 2025, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Web search portal and other information service industry sales are forecast to grow at a 3.04% compounded annual rate from 2025 to 2029, slower than the growth of the overall economy, according to Inforum and the Interindustry Economic Research Fund, Inc.