Surfing the Broadband Bit Stream

The advocacy group leaders highlighted major settlements and accomplishments as reasons for expanding budget.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions...have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” the FCC Chair posted on X

Amagi has published its latest report into regional FAST viewership alongside a special survey looking at AI in Media Operations.

Asked to evaluate 20 end-to-end content operations tasks, respondents across broadcast and streaming identified information-driven workflows such as metadata enrichment, context tagging, subtitling and translation.

Srinivasan KA, co-founder and president, global business, Amagi, commented, “The industry is entering a phase where AI is no longer just about experimentation — it’s about embedding intelligence directly into operational workflows. Media companies that integrate applied AI across ingest, localisation, scheduling, and monetisation will unlock meaningful gains in speed, efficiency, and scalability.”

ZDNET's key takeaways 

• Nvidia's NemoClaw aims to make OpenClaw agents more secure.
• OpenClaw agents are highly capable, but come with risks.
• The company also launched a multi-lab open-source model coalition.

"What's your OpenClaw strategy?" Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asked rhetorically to the crowd at Nvidia GTC, the company's annual AI conference, on Monday. 

The company is full steam ahead on AI agents -- and it's hoping its latest release can fix OpenClaw's security problem. During the keynote, Huang announced Nvidia's new NemoClaw stack, which is built to shore up the OpenClaw agent platform, the viral open-source assistant framework that has impressed users with its autonomous capabilities. 

We studied the performance of 14 of the largest municipal networks from December 2024 through December 2025, and compared their performance to each other and to their ISP competitors.

Key Takeaways: 

• When compared to their broadband competitors, eight municipal providers in the U.S. that we monitored using Ookla Speedtest data beat their broadband competitors in median upload speeds and one municipal provider, Sherwood Broadband, outpaced the competition in median download speeds. We monitored a total of 14 municipal providers, however, one provider —EBP— did not have any competitors with enough test samples to compare its performance against. 

Washington (March 15, 2026) - Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, today sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr, urging him to resign over his latest social media post threatening to revoke broadcasters’ licenses if they do not cover the illegal war with Iran with Donald Trump’s preferred narrative.

Senator Markey highlights this post as an extraordinary abuse of FCC authority and a clear violation of the First Amendment, as well as the Trump administration’s latest authoritarian attempt to weaponize the FCC’s statutory authority to censor the media.

The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since February 28, 2026. Brent crude broke $100 a barrel, the IEA took the unprecedented step of releasing 400 million barrels from strategic reserves, and the entire market is focused on oil prices and what happens at the pump. But I spend my time picking apart energy bottlenecks for AI data centers, and what I see behind the oil headlines looks more consequential — and far less priced in — than a temporary fuel cost spike. 

My thesis: the Hormuz crisis shifts the US data center buildout timeline by 12 to 24 months on a significant share of projects — not through a single channel, but through five parallel supply chain shocks with different delay lags, several of which reinforce each other. The probability-weighted estimate of a material delay sits around 50%. That’s not a tail risk. That’s a coin flip.

WASHINGTON, March 13, 2026 – Some rural broadband providers are struggling to secure fiber that complies with a $42.45 billion grant program’s domestic manufacturing rules.

Two ISPs participating in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, plus a distributor, contractor, and others described orders for fiber being unexpectedly canceled in recent weeks. Most requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing business relationships. 

Service assurance is officially graduating from an era of dashboards, tickets, and engineers scrambling to find what’s gone wrong to swift root cause analysis and proactive fixes

When Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it sought to foster innovation and competition in telecommunications markets, expand the definition of universal service, and modernize regulatory structures for the digital age.

Three decades later, architects of the ‘96 Act say it achieved many of those goals, but numerous legal challenges following its passage reshaped how key provisions were implemented.

“Litigation shaped so much of what the Act eventually became,” said Mignon Clyburn, a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, speaking Thursday among a panel of former FCC regulators, legal counsel, and policy advisors who helped shape and defend the landmark telecom law.

Gathered for an event organized by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society marking the law’s 30th anniversary, the event reflected on both the spirit and letter of the landmark legislation which has shaped much of the modern Internet in the United States. The first major overhaul of telecommunications law in more than 60 years, the ‘96 Act required the FCC to conduct more than 80 separate rulemakings addressing everything from appropriate pricing, to interconnection rules and the unbundling of incumbent telephone networks.

In late 2024 the Biden FCC implemented a new rule requiring that broadband providers include a “nutrition label for broadband,” making any fees, restrictions, usage caps, or other limits clear at the point of sale. The proposal was mandated by Congress as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law to try and ensure the quality of taxpayer-subsidized broadband.

The proposal was well-intentioned. It mandated a certain level of transparency on telecoms to ensure that consumers knew exactly what kind of broadband connection they were buying. The effort attempted to counter historically dodgy practices by bigger providers to jack up their advertised prices using sneaky and misleading below-the-line fees.

But four years after Congress proposed the idea, studies began making it clear that ISPs weren’t seriously adhering to the rules, and regulators weren’t really interested in enforcing them anyway.

Daniela Amodei, who cofounded Anthropic with her brother Dario, said uniquely human qualities will actually be more critical in the age of AI, not less.

SAN JOSE, March 16, 2026 (AP) – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday elaborated on his vision for keeping his company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom that he predicted will produce a $1 trillion backlog in orders within the next year.

Huang, 63, also touched upon many of the themes that he has been trumpeting since he emerged as one of Silicon Valley's most influential voices during the past few years, including his thesis that the AI buildup remains in its infancy.

Fierce Network recently had an interesting article about Consumer Cellular. This is a cellular MVNO that you might not have heard of. For those not familiar with the term, an MVNO is a cellular company that buys wholesale minutes and data from one of the large cellular carriers and markets the cellular product under its

own brand name. Consumer Cellular operates on the AT&T network.

The company was founded over thirty years ago, aligns with AARP, and has always marketed to older cellular customers. Consumer Cellular stresses affordable cell plans, and its average revenue per customer is around $30 per month. The most interesting thing about the company is that it is growing while many other MNVOs are shrinking. The company has grown to over 4.4 million customers and is still seeing continued customer growth.

A month after Seedance 2.0's launch in China sparked cease-and-desist letters from Disney and Paramount Skydance over its use of copyrighted materials, its developer ByteDance has reportedly hit pause on the release of the AI video tool in other regions. According to The Information, which spoke to two anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter, ByteDance has suspended Seedance 2.0's global rollout. Engadget has reached out to ByteDance for comment and will update this story if we hear back with more information.

Seedance 2.0 caught heat from Hollywood studios almost immediately upon its release, after user-generated videos including a viral AI clip of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise sparked concerns that copyrighted works were used in training the model. In February, ByteDance told the BBC that it is "taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users." It's unclear when exactly ByteDance planned to release the tool more widely.

ROME - Mr. Peter Thiel, the US billionaire venture capitalist and early supporter of President Donald Trump, launched on March 15 a series of closed-door lectures in Rome exploring the concept

of the Antichrist, drawing scrutiny from Catholic commentators.

The invitation-only conference, which runs until March 18, is not open to the press and its venue has not been publicly disclosed. Organisers quoted in the media say participants are drawn from academia, technology and religious circles.

A co-founder of Palantir Technologies, an AI software company with deep ties to the US defence and intelligence agencies, Mr. Thiel has in recent years devoted increasing attention to religious and philosophical ideas.

In 2025, he held a similar series of talks in San Francisco exploring the possibility that the Antichrist – a figure who opposes or denies Christ – could emerge on the global stage.

Software demos and Pentagon records detail how chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude could help the Pentagon analyze intelligence and suggest next steps.

An ongoing and heated dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic is raising new questions about how the startup’s technology is actually used inside the US military. In late February, Anthropic refused to grant the government unconditional access to its Claude AI models, insisting the systems should not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon responded by labeling Anthropic's products a “supply-chain risk,” prompting the startup to file two lawsuits this week alleging illegal retaliation by the Trump administration and seeking to overturn the designation.

The clash, along with the rapidly escalating war in Iran, has drawn attention to Anthropic’s partnership with the military contractor Palantir, which announced in November 2024 that it would integrate Claude into the software it sells to US intelligence and defense agencies. Palantir says the Claude integration can help analysts uncover “data-driven insights,” identify patterns, and support making “informed decisions in time-sensitive situations.”