Charter has asked a court to toss AT&T's 'fiber-powered' lawsuit – a fight that could decide how Charter weaves 'fiber' into its marketing messages.

Charter Communications fired back in a court case that could determine how the broadband operator can use the terms "fiber broadband network" and "fiber-powered" in its marketing, its website and its communications with customers.

On Friday (October 23), Charter filed its response to an AT&T-led lawsuit in front of a Texas district court alleging that the operator's use of those terms amounts to false advertising that misleads customers. In its motion to dismiss the case, Charter argued that there's nothing false or misleading about Charter's use of those terms and therefore the case should be tossed out.

AT&T's complaint, filed in late August, zeroes in on Charter's use of those terms to describe its widely deployed hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) network.

Highway thieves are using sophisticated digital tactics that investigators worry make it easy to rob trucks carrying millions in expensive data center equipment.

NBC News spoke to “several industry leaders, consultants, and investigators advising law enforcement” offices probing the biggest thefts yet and reported that since June, thieves have “made away with more than $100 million in data center freight.”

Here’s how they said thieves get away with it:

Direct-to-device (D2D) services are becoming table stakes for mobile operators that are seeking to fill in coverage gaps in their terrestrial networks, but those same operators are concerned that tapping certain spectrum for D2D could hamstring their core 5G businesses.

CTIA, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have asked the FCC to strip out the 2.5GHz and 3GHz bands from D2D use because it will degrade the performance of 5G rules being drafted for Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) and D2D connectivity. Naturally, any and all spectrum used for D2D would benefit others, such as Starlink, that are pushing forward with next-gen D2D platforms.

☕ Cold Brew

The AI trade ran into the cost of money this week. A hotter inflation print lifted rate-hike bets, debt-heavy builders like CoreWeave fell first, and by Thursday more than $1 trillion had left 20 of the biggest AI and chip stocks.

A Flood of Lawsuits Could Help Make AI Safer

Two days ago, Texas filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman under the state's Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a consumer protection law.

In the lawsuit, the state's attorney general argues that OpenAI engaged in false, misleading, and deceptive practices while conducting its business, including:

Good morning! I had the good fortune to see many in the Tech Policy Press community this week in Montreal at Attention: Democracy Rebuilt, a conference hosted by Paradigms, McGill University, the Max Bell School of Public Policy, and the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy.

In his opening remarks at the conference, host Taylor Owen made the case that democracy requires citizens to have both knowledge about and the means to participate in the development of the technologies that define the information environment and so much about how society works.

And Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, in her remarks, reminded us why authoritarians want to cut the people out of the picture. “The strong man needs the tech oligarch,” she said. “The tech oligarch needs the strong man. The strong man weaponizes the law. The oligarchy gives the strong man reach. The strong man gives the oligarchy protection.”

Policymakers should withdraw the proposed $70,000 Optional Practical Training fee and pursue targeted reforms that address fraud without driving away the scientists and engineers the United States needs.

How can anyone be surprised about the PHP hack when hacking is the business model? We’ve had a cybersecurity crisis for decades, driven by Wall Street financiers and deregulation. Let’s wake up.

Lots of monopoly-related news this week, as usual. The AI bubble continues to blow off steam, as even Elon Musk is saying the neoclouds are going bust, which BIG predicted a couple of weeks ago. And, as we race toward a consequential midterm election, Republican voters are demanding financial services reform, and a new Congressional report called “Settling for Less” is laying the foundation for oversight and accountability regarding the Trump Administration’s failed approach to antitrust enforcement.

But before we get to all of that, which is below for paid subscribers, you may have seen a lot of chatter last week about a wave of AI-enabled cybersecurity failures that resulted in the preemptive takedown of government websites around the world. The effects were also local and diffuse. I was talking about this with a friend who said the platform for coordinating his kid’s soccer league was shut down for a couple of days, leaving parents in the lurch on upcoming schedules.

Basically, the internet is being ruined by a massive new AI-fueled set of hacks, a situation nicknamed “Black October” by cybersecurity experts. Big or small, there’s a lot to unpack here and an opportunity to reflect on what this says about our failure to anticipate and govern for risk. Let’s dive in.

Investment boom in AI is a financial bubble "primed to pop," warns report. Lawmakers urged to protect working-class Americans from potential harm.

Earlier this week, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion fine for violating consumer protection laws dating back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. $25 billion is a massive fine, the largest Meta has ever faced, but it still had us folks at WIRED wondering: Would Meta even feel the pain?

A quick recap of the case: Filed in 2021, the suit alleged that the company violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act by lying to Meta users about the way it handled their data. (Later, New Mexico’s attorney general also made claims against Meta’s content moderation policies.) In September, a jury ruled in favor of the state. Then came the multibillion-dollar penalty.

Elon Musk spoke to podcast "The Builders" about his time leading DOGE, stating that his proximity to Trump's power was seductive.

The billionaire agreed that he was basically drunk on the Trump administration's power and now thinks he shouldn't have continued running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for so long.

Trump and Musk had been fairly aligned prior to this point. Musk told The Builders that he had supported President Donald Trump's run for office out of a desire for a free market economy and "less bureaucracy," as well as interests such as "aspirationally sensible spending."

The U.S. military has granted SpaceX access to some of the Pentagon’s most sensitive and confidential satellite tracking data. That’s according to The Guardian, which reports the new agreement between U.S. Space Force and Elon Musk gives SpaceX access to restricted information used to track satellites and debris on Earth’s orbit.

This follows Musk’s efforts to privatize space traffic control. Last year, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Musk, fired scores of employees at the Traffic Coordination System for Space, while the Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to gut funding to the program.

SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) is in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure company to secure a minimum of 80,000 locations across the U.S. on which to deploy cell sites for its prospective nationwide mobile network, Bloomberg reported. Sources indicate that SpaceX is in talks with Crown Castle (NYSE: CCI) along with American Tower (NYSE: AMT) and Vertical Bridge. None of the companies commented. 

At the market close on Friday, shares of Crown Castle were up nine percent, leading the three nationwide public tower companies which together averaged a nearly six percent increase for the day. By contrast, shares of mobile network operators, AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) and T-Mobile US (NASDAQ: TMUS), collectively were down by an average of nearly six percent for the day, reflecting concerns about the potential new competition. 

A municipal utility’s step-by-step, engineering-led approach offers a model for community broadband. 

The Holland Board of Public Works (HBPW) has built one of the most advanced open-access fiber networks in the upper Midwest, delivering gigabit connectivity to residents and businesses across the city of Holland, Michigan.

The network is the result of steady, deliberate work. HBPW first built fiber for its own operations, then extended service to local anchor institutions and businesses. It tested the citywide concept with a downtown pilot, brought a detailed plan to the community, and moved into construction after a public vote to fund the project. At each stage, the utility made decisions that reduced financial and schedule risk.

On August 31, the Trump administration sent formal notice of a $1.42 billion grant to California to supply broadband access to 270,000 households and businesses, as authorized in the 2021 infrastructure law signed by President Biden. Gov. Gavin Newsom has until November 1 to accept the federal broadband deployment grant. 

But if Newsom accepts the award, the state must also agree to not enforce its nation-leading standards for broadband affordability and reliability for 14 years, forgoing mandatory low-income plans and other benefits that save consumers billions of dollars, as well as the strongest net neutrality and anti-throttling laws in the country.

This requirement, known as “Condition 50,” was inserted by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) into the terms and conditions of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program a year ago. The enforcement restrictions don’t just apply to BEAD projects, but to all state broadband laws and regulations on any internet service provider (ISP) that receives funding, including any laws passed in the future.

If you own CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV) or Nebius Group N.V. (NBIS), Elon Musk's X feed has become required reading. His posts have jolted both stocks more than once this month.

On Sunday, Oct. 25, he posted again, and this time he had a SpaceX deal to show off.

Musk wrote on X that Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX) has closed $40 billion in debt to buy GPUs, the chips that run AI models. Then he turned to neoclouds, the smaller companies that rent those chips out.

NEW ALBANY, OHIO – As Karen Bucher, standing on her front porch, started to describe the noise she said keeps her and her husband up at night, a massive boom thundered across the few remaining fields around their subdivision in Licking County, Ohio. The Buchers’ home is one of 37 in a loop around Bermuda Drive, now surrounded by data centers and construction sites owned by Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, as well as a massive microchip factory being built by Intel. The Buchers and their neighbors are the last holdouts here in the New Albany epicenter of Ohio’s tech and data center boom, but within a year, they said, they too will leave, and all their homes will be demolished. 

In the fastest-developing areas, like the branded “Silicon Heartland” of central Ohio, small landowners and homeowners are trying to figure out how to either profit and get out, or fight to stay in their homes.

When grid power can't arrive fast enough, developers are looking beyond the meter.

The AI infrastructure boom is creating an unprecedented need for electricity. 

Data center developers are pursuing sites requiring hundreds of megawatts, while utilities work through load requests, transmission constraints, substation upgrades, and long equipment lead times.

For some projects, the traditional path to grid-delivered power may not align with the customer's deployment schedule.

That has brought another strategy into sharper focus:

Pew Research has been doing annual national surveys of broadband usage since 2000 and recently released the results of the 2026 survey. Pew surveyed 5,511 adults across the country, with a survey that achieved an overall margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.

The most interesting thing about the survey report is that it contrasts people who use the Internet from any source with those who have home broadband. The report is full of graphs, and the data by year is available with a click under each graph.

The overall percentage of adults who use the Internet continues to creep upward and is at 96%. The bottom line story is that most people use the Internet, but there are differences when looking at demographic factors:

Former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai even joined in, urging the Commission to drop a wide swath of radio waves for a spectrum proposal that could help SpaceX's cellular ambitions.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have teamed up to try to stop an FCC proposal that could free up more radio spectrum to SpaceX’s upcoming challenger, Starlink Mobile. 

Representatives for the carriers met with FCC officials this week and urged them to amend the proposal, according to a regulatory filing spotted by SpaceX and Tesla watcher Sawyer Merritt. 

The FCC’s proposal, slated for a vote next week, could open 482MHz of spectrum for satellite-to-phone services, including Starlink Mobile. Elon Musk’s company has already acquired about 80MHz of spectrum for its carrier ambitions, but analysts say SpaceX needs significantly more, as each of the big three carriers has about 300MHz in spectrum.  

In a recent report, the Federal Communications Commission revealed a worrisome paradox in America’s cellular networks: they reach nearly everyone, but not nearly everywhere. While 95 percent of the U.S. population can receive 5G service from at least one carrier, only 69 percent of the nation’s road miles and 39 percent of its land area have such coverage. In rural America, the numbers fall to 60 percent and 38 percent.

This is the rural-mobile divide. It is not about whether a household can obtain broadband at home. It is about losing mobile service while driving, farming, hiking, fighting a wildfire or responding to an emergency.

The conventional solution is to build more cell towers. Some are still needed. But extending terrestrial networks to every remote road, ravine and mountaintop would be economically irrational. The FCC has approved a plan to provide up to $9 billion to close the remaining gaps in America’s 5G cellular networks. But instead of treating every dead zone as a construction problem, we should consider whether the last cell towers should instead be placed in orbit.

My Google Home Speaker had been burning through more data than all the rest of my devices combined. As I looked into it further, I found other smart home devices that had the same problem.

Key questions about social media harms remain unsettled due to lack of research data — a problem that is repeating for AI risks, writes Jen Rosiere Reynolds.

In September, AI executives voiced fears of human extinction. President Trump moved quickly to sign a “morally binding” framework for AI companies to self-police.

The gap in urgency between these two events, just days apart, leaves the public largely in the dark about AI risks. Researchers, for their part, are limited in their work by industry opacity. The situation is reminiscent of research on social media, which has long struggled with access to platform data. Today, we are at risk of forgetting lessons from that work in the face of a technology that is much more powerful, even putting aside speculation of so-called superintelligence.

AI companies’ restrictions on data and models give them significant power while limiting the ability of independent researchers or the public to assess the technology’s impact. Self-policing can work if corporate and public incentives are aligned or there is external pressure shaping behavior. External pressure can only happen if outside researchers or the public have enough visibility to evaluate impact. When companies restrict transparency, how can the public or government know if any slow-down or oversight is appropriate?