Every World Cup fan deserves a seat. Norton Neo says its free browser is the ticket
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Presented by Norton For 39 days this summer, the planet will be doing roughly the same thing at the same time. The 2026 World Cup spans 104 matches across 16 cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with billions of people likely to watch over the course of the tournament. It could very well be one of the largest shared events the internet has ever been asked to carry. What’s changed since the last tournament isn’t the scale, it’s the screen. For a growing share of that audience, the match won’t come through television. It’ll come through a browser tab. The problem is the browser you have today simply does not give you a frictionless and reliable way to watch the World Cup for free.In the U.S., a majority of viewers now expect to stream the tournament digitally rather than watch on cable or satellite. It only works when you have a paid subscription. But there is a challenge — for example, fans coming from Europe for who want to watch the game in the U.S. just like they are able to watch it for free in Europe. Watching the World Cup has been harder than it should beAsk anyone who has tried to watch a tournament online and the answers are remarkably consistent across every cycle. Streams stutter and buffer when it matters most. The “free stream” someone forwarded turns out to be a chain of lookalike sites and dead-end links. And the legitimate platforms want a credit card, and maybe a generous helping of personal data too before they’ll play a single minute.One company’s bet: Neo Norton’s answer is Neo, a browser built on the premise that protection and access can live in the browser software itself rather than in a stack of add-ons the user has to go find, install, and pay for. It's less about adding features than removing friction. Remove the steps between a person and the thing they came to do.“The tournament is the kind of moment the modern web was supposed to be great at: everyone, everywhere, on the same thing in real time,” says Howie Xu, Chief AI