Communications Daily reports...

NTIA sees the current BEAD program as the “last broadband subsidy program” the U.S. will need, said David Brodian, the agency's chief counsel, during an FCBA webinar Thursday. Brodian’s comments were at odds with those from other officials who questioned whether the current program will lead to universal coverage (see 2606110064).

In late May 2026, Reuters reported that SpaceX had renegotiated the price the Pentagon is paying for getting Starlink connectivity on LUCAS one-way attack drones during the Iran campaign. Connectivity that had been costing about $5,000 per terminal at the land/mobility tier was reclassified by SpaceX as aviation-tier service, and increased the price to approximately $25,000 per terminal. The Pentagon agreed to the increase while strikes against Iran were ongoing.

As any modern technologist is well aware, LUCAS is the US’ Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System, a one-way attack drone built by SpektreWorks and modeled on the Iranian Shahed-136. It saw combat in February 2026, during Operation Epic Fury against Iranian drone and missile infrastructure. The LUCAS platform's unit cost runs approximately $30,000 to $35,000. Its entire value proposition is being cheap enough to use in quantity against targets that would otherwise require Tomahawks at $1.3M per shot.

Most of the cloud applications that businesses have added over the last decade was designed around the same basic assumption, that bandwidth is for consuming and not for creating. You received email, streamed video, loaded web applications. The data flowed toward you.

That assumption shaped how commercial internet infrastructure was built and sold across the country, including here in Southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, and Rhode Island. A business internet plan promising 500 Mbps down and 50 Mbps up seemed reasonable. The ratio made sense for the workflows it was serving.

What can Seattle learn from Cleveland's fall and comeback? GeekWire's John Cook and Seattle angel investor Charles Fitzgerald spent several days in Cleveland, talking with civic, business and political leaders — including the city's mayor and the governor of Ohio — to find out.

WASHINGTON, June 11, 2026 – Louisiana has finalized its grant agreement with SpaceX under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, the state said Thursday.

The satellite operator is set to serve 10,635 homes and businesses in the state for about $8.2 million, based on the state’s approved BEAD spending plan.

The satellite operator has signed agreements in multiple other states.

WASHINGTON, June 11, 2026 – Rep. April McClain Delaney, D-Md., and three House colleagues are pressing the Commerce Department over what they described as unlawful withholding of funds from the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.

House Democrats dispute characterization of $21 billion in unspent funds as ‘taxpayer savings.’

The lawmakers sent a letter Thursday to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth seeking explanations for delays and what they described as a lack of transparency.

Mirroring the historic surge in data center investments, which are heavily tax-abated, state and local government revenue losses are spiking. While 14 states still fail to disclose periodically one aggregate dollar figure for tax revenue lost to data centers, the four states known to already be losing $1 billion or more per year have all disclosed or projected sharply higher losses since our April 2025 “Cloudy with A Loss of Spending Control” report.

It's now consensus that we're in a bubble of investment in AI data centers, and that it's a risk to our economy. If the stock market declines, how bad could it get? Where are there areas of contagion?

Today I want to ask what the popping of the AI bubble would look like, and whether it would precipitate a broader financial crash. And if it does so, what shape will it take? The right way to start is by analogy, as there are lessons from previous crashes and the governance that came out of them that we can learn from. For reasons I’ll get into, while 2008 and Covid could be useful to look at, the best analogy is dot com era.

First, it’s important to scope out what I’m not going to talk about, which is the governance of AI as a technology. It certainly matters whether we are creating a God-like system, a useful general purpose technology, or a moderately useful toy. There are many fascinating questions around copyright, liability, monopolization, and so forth, but it’s hard to offer persuasive tech policy arguments in the midst of a bubble.

In many ways, the key important question facing us today is the financing of AI, and the fact that we have placed a economy-sized bet on the enterprises claiming to focus on this technology. Just seven stocks - all linked to AI - comprise a third of the stock market, and AI capital investment is likely to be between $750 billion and a trillion dollars this year, which is big enough that it affects macro-economic growth numbers.

"The result," said the author of a new Public Citizen analysis, "is a self-reinforcing loop where corporate cash buys policy, and policy pays cash back."

Eighty-eight corporations that paid no federal income tax last year spent roughly $852 million on US campaign contributions and lobbying during recent election cycles, a report published Thursday revealed.

The report, “The Current Price of Zero,” was authored by Eileen O’Grady, a researcher at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. The publication draws upon an analysis published in April by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) showing that at least 88 of the nation’s largest companies paid no federal corporate income tax in fiscal year 2025, despite reporting combined US pretax income of around $105 billion.

AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon have formed a unified front with the cable industry when it comes to fighting copper theft and other forms of network vandalism.

The most AI-obsessed firms are spending roughly $7,500 monthly per employee on AI, per Ramp AI Index. That's not more than an engineer's salary — yet.

An Nvidia executive recently said that the cost of compute is now greater than the salaries of his employees. Last week, Mercor’s CEO said the startup is spending more on tokens for internal agents than on employee headcount.

As enterprises blow through their token budgets, a big question is: Are companies actually spending more on AI than on humans?

The data center build out, and the subsidies underpinning it, are becoming hot-button issues in key races.

Data centers are popping up throughout the country — including in my home state of Michigan. As of December, there were at least 16 in the works, with MLive dubbing 2025 “the year of the data center” for the state. Nationwide, data centers have grown at least 150% between 2010 and 2025.

But this isn’t inevitable — or happening solely because companies are pushing to build them in their race for artificial intelligence (AI) dominance. Instead, Michigan lawmakers — along with a majority of other states — are accelerating this trend, offering billions of dollars in tax breaks to incentivize technology and utility monopolies to build large data centers.

These tax breaks impose significant costs on the community, and Michiganders are fighting back. According to Howell, Michigan board member Tim Boal, Michiganders backlash to data centers is something he’s “never seen before.” Will this anger change policy, or will lawmakers in the state continue to unfairly prioritize big money interests over their other constituents?

A coalition of state attorneys general has reportedly opened an investigation into OpenAI.

It's not clear which states are involved, but they're asking about everything from OpenAI's ad policies to its handling of health data.

The company was served with a subpoena from New York’s attorney general on Friday, according to The Wall Street Journal. That subpoena sought documents related to a broad range of topics including the company’s advertising, user engagement and retention, model sycophancy, handling of consumer data and health data, and treatment of minors and seniors.

As the leaked documents demonstrate, the abundance project is orchestrated by Silicon Valley elites—they even use the word “elite” by choice.

According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: “Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.” Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance.

Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”

This sentiment is laid out in substantial detail, filling 31 pages across two separate documents obtained by the Prospect. In an email exchange, Rosen confirmed the documents’ legitimacy.

I'm borrowing the recap from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society on the following. It you want more information, I suggest reading the original letter:

Representative April McClain Delaney (D-MD-06) led a letter with her House colleagues demanding that the Department of Commerce explain its continued withholding of appropriated funds that Congress explicitly authorized under its historic $65 billion-dollar internet initiative known as the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. 

Prior to serving as a Member of Congress, Rep. McClain Delaney was the Deputy Assistant Secretary and Deputy Administrator at NTIA under the Biden-Harris Administration and helped build and launch the national BEAD program.

WASHINGTON, June 11, 2026 – Worried about a patchwork of rules ahead of a major broadband grant program, federal regulators are taking a look at state-level pole attachment laws.

An inquiry asked how the agency could make state rules ‘more transparent and effective’

June 11, 2026 — Arkansas said it has become the first state to execute a Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) agreement with Amazon Leo, a low-Earth orbit (LEO) internet access provider. Arkansas also signed a grant agreement with SpaceX.

Somebody sent me a link to an interesting article posted on 99% Invisible, a website associated with a podcast that looks at “the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about — the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world” The article covers a book called "The Long Lines" that documents the

the abandoned infrastructure of the national microwave network built by AT&T that predated the eventual long-haul fiber networks that now connects us.

The AT&T microwave network was built in the 1950s. The first long-haul microwave route put into service was between New York and Chicago, and went live on September 1, 1950. Over the next few years, microwave routes were established across the country.

The networks were enabled by the high-powered klystrons developed during World War II, plus new microwave technologies that allowed for the simultaneous transmission of multiple channels of data. A klyston is a vacuum tube that amplifies a signal from a low-power level to a higher one. The klystron system enabled the creation of microwave links with enough power to carry not only voice calls, but television signals. The technology was developed at Bell Labs, and the microwave radios were manufactured by Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T.

Iran threatens to target Elon Musk's SpaceX facilities in the Middle East, including Starlink ground stations, amid IPO success.

While Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets have typically had no trouble exploding on their own accord, they could soon get some assistance from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Tehran’s state-run Fars News Agency reported on Thursday that Iranian officials have added assets owned by Musk throughout the Middle East to their target lists, noting the US and Israeli military’s use of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite services in operations against Iranian infrastructure.

Tomorrow's IPO of SpaceX could turn out to be the universe's largest Ponzi scheme, and you and I are paying part of the price whether we like it or not.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX goes on the market tomorrow. Rather than provide a range and then price the deal based on demand, as is customary in Initial Public Offerings, Musk has set a take-it-or-leave-it price of $135 per share.

He anticipates that the resulting corporation will be valued at $1.77 trillion. That’s an extraordinary amount for a company that generated $18.7 billion in revenue last year and recorded an operating loss of $4.2 billion.

In other words, Musk is offering SpaceX stock at roughly 100 times the company’s total revenue in 2025. This is ballsy, to say the least, given SpaceX’s consistent negative profitability and its failure to meet prior goals. But it’s a great deal for Musk. He comes out of it with nearly a trillion dollars.

The FCC has approved the NCTA's petition for expedited waivers on 'covered' consumer modems, gateways and routers that implement relatively minor changes.

The FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology wasted little time in partially approving a petition filed by the NCTA–The Internet & Television Association that sought an expedited waiver for foreign-made consumer broadband routers that require relatively small changes, including alterations to memory modules and other types of substitute "substrate materials."

The FCC order, which was filed and adopted on June 9, effectively allows NCTA cable operator members and their suppliers to make limited and permitted Class I and Class II hardware changes to consumer grade routers that currently are on the FCC's "Covered List" in the wake of the Commission's ban on new, foreign made routers that was implemented in March. Generally, Class I changes include minor modifications that don't change the RF characteristics of a device, and Class II includes more substantive modifications that may alter RF performance or device emissions.