BT, Britain's telecoms incumbent, which in 2000 announced that it had a patent on hyperlinks, a technology that allows people to click on a web-page link to go to another web address.

ECONOMIST: The arms race

Since such links have to be built explicitly into each page, they reflect the opinions of the designers of a particular page about which other pages are pertinent (and note that a designer does not have to ask permission of the owner of another page to build a link to it).

ECONOMIST: Hits and misses

In the upper left-hand corner of the page, another link highlighted in blue directs readers to a copy of a document, apparently a warrant filed on February 15, 1998, by an FBI agent named Edmund V.

CNN: 'The Insider' goes public