Kalamazoo County brought five subject-matter experts together Thursday to help residents understand what data centers and battery energy storage.

The event, held June 25 at the Dale B. Lake Auditorium on the Kalamazoo Valley Community College Texas Township campus, drew a full house. Kalamazoo County Government organized the panel and invited residents, elected officials, and local government leaders to attend.

The county was clear from the start about its own role: Kalamazoo County government has no authority over whether data centers or battery storage projects get sited or approved. Those decisions belong to local units of government: city commissions, township boards, planning commissions. The evening was educational, not a hearing, and no decisions were made.

What it was, though, was one of the more substantive public conversations Kalamazoo County has hosted on a topic that’s generating real questions from residents across the region.

Last week, Brazil’s Electoral Court unveiled an ambitious new instrument to force Big Tech firms to make their election efforts more transparent: compliance plans. In an unprecedented measure, platforms will have to provide comprehensive and structured information on how they monitor, address and counter disinformation, coordinated inauthentic behavior and AI-generated political content.

With just two months before Brazilians head to the polls, the question is whether the Electoral Court will have the means and willpower to enforce it—and if platforms will be willing to cooperate.

One expert warned the change allows for FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to shake down broadcasters, but legal challenges are sure to follow.

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday repealed a 22-year-old law limiting how many local TV stations a company can own, a move that’s likely to shake up the industry and open the door to more M&A activity. 

The cap was first implemented by Congress in 2004 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act to prevent monopolization and ensure viewpoint diversity. It limits entities from owning or controlling broadcast television stations that reach more than 39% of U.S. TV households. Going forward, the FCC plans to conduct a case-by-case review, in which it will approve or deny future deals based on whether they meet the agency’s public interest standard, not a specific percentage cap. 

Companies like Nexstar and Sinclair have lobbied for the cap to be raised or eliminated, arguing that their competition is no longer just other stations, but streaming services and tech giants like Amazon and YouTube who do not have to adhere to the same restriction. They maintain that industry consolidation is needed in order to thrive and survive in the current media landscape. 

July may come to be seen as a turning point for the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), writes Knight-Georgetown Institute's Peter Chapman.

Last month may come to be seen as a turning point for the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Over the course of July, the European Commission paired major policy initiatives with a series of consequential enforcement actions involving some of the world's largest technology companies. Even seasoned DSA experts have been struck by the pace and scope of these developments.

Through enforcement decisions, the Commission began to clarify the DSA’s broad legal obligations. These actions will test Brussels’ ability to shape whether and how these companies redesign their products to better protect safety, information integrity, and user wellbeing amid a fraught transatlantic landscape.

The $85 billion proposed merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern would create the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. Workers, shippers, and even business rivals are against it.

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Hawaii is moving forward with a nearly $150 million broadband expansion aimed at bringing high-speed internet to rural and underserved communities across the state.

The Governor’s Office and University of Hawaii announced Tuesday that deployment of $149.5 million in federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding is set to begin.

The state finalized a contract with Hawaiian Telcom to bring fiber-optic service to about 5,800 homes that currently lack modern broadband access.

Point-to-point rocket delivery could cut down on transportation times. But engineers will need to figure out how to integrate rockets into current transportation systems.

You might think about rockets as powerful vehicles that blast astronaut crews and robotic missions off into space. But what if they could be used to send cargo from one side of the Earth to the other, in a fraction of the time it would take a plane? The company SpaceX recently announced a project that aims to use its rockets to do just that.

SpaceX launched its Starfall demo mission on June 23, 2026. According to a document from the Federal Aviation Administration, Starfall has two main purposes: to use rockets to quickly deliver cargo around the world, and to deliver cargo to and from space. The latter could allow for in-space manufacturing markets that take advantage of microgravity and the vacuum of space.

We are aerospace engineers who study space flight. SpaceX seems to be positioning Starfall not only as a key component of a superfast delivery system, but also as infrastructure that could support future in-space manufacturing opportunities.

Why It Matters

Millions of Americans lack broadband access, or high-speed internet, and that access is critical for employment, education, health care, and routine daily functions. Over 100 federal programs administered by 15 agencies support broadband, yet no overarching national strategy exists to coordinate them. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified before the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, Committee on Energy and Commerce on July 21, synthesizing findings from its May 2022 and April 2025 reports. The testimony didn't provide recommendations, but tracked the status of prior ones, which remain mostly unaddressed.

The Big Picture

A few weeks ago, I mapped five ways SpaceX could enter the U.S. mobile market. A greenfield build, an MVNO agreement, a major carrier acquisition, distressed asset purchases, and a decentralized small cell grid. At that point, Musk clearly wanted the market. The operating model was still open.

The second quarter financial results closed most of that. SpaceX did not formally rule anything out, but the first set of public accounts tells you where the capital goes, and capital allocation is a more honest statement of intent than anything said on a call.

The answer is one architecture plus one bridge. An inside-out network built on satellites, owned spectrum, a SpaceX core, and distributed small cells at customer premises, with wholesale terrestrial access underneath it wherever the satellite and the cells cannot reach. That much is roughly what I expected.

What I did not expect is what the quarter says about priority. This is not a man building a telco; it is a company using a telco to build something else.

The Federal Communications Commission, the government agency that regulates the broadcast airwaves, voted Thursday to eliminate a cap on the share of U.S. television households a single company can reach, a major move that could pave the way for more corporate consolidation in the media industry.

In a 2-1 vote, the FCC repealed a 22-year-old rule holding that a company cannot own stations that reach more than a combined 39% of the U.S. television audience. The ownership limit will be replaced by a case-by-case approach.

Connect Humanity the Alt Funding Field Guide that is intended to provide ideas for those who are working to solve the digital divide, like digital navigators. The purpose of the guide is to provide a range of ideas about the immediate future of the digital inclusion field and to provide ideas for practitioners on where federal grant funding has largely disappeared. I should disclose that I participated in writing one of the chapters.

One of the most interesting chapters was written by Catherine Crago Blanton, who worked with affordable housing in Austin, Texas. She describes the benefits of bringing broadband to low-income housing, both to residents and to landlords.

Elon Musk and his SpaceX management team used the company’s first earnings conference call since its IPO to unveil its plan to build an extensive Starlink cellular small cell network across the US in order to compete directly with the market’s three major telcos, AT&T, T-Mobile US and Verizon, by providing “connectivity that is, we think, probably better and higher bandwidth than what is currently available from cellular providers,” noted Musk. 

While discussions about the future of universal service continue in the courts and the halls of Congress, the FCC is also actively considering how to modernize the High-Cost program and other portions of the Universal Service Fund (USF).

Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I live in San Francisco, among the young researchers earning million-dollar salaries and the start-up founders competing to build the next unicorn. While Silicon Valley has long warned about the risk of rogue A.I., it has recently woken up to a more mundane nightmare: one in which many ordinary people lose their economic leverage as their jobs are automated away.

Most economists and A.I. experts do not expect [the most extreme] scenario, but the persistence of the permanent underclass idea should concern all of us. First, because it signals how much collateral damage the A.I. companies will tolerate en route to A.G.I. And second, because the production of a social underclass is a policy choice. Instead of waiting for impact, we need to think seriously — now — about how we plan to support workers through A.I. disruption.

What just happened? Texas has put a hold on new data center approvals that require access to the state's grid, a move that could slow a long list of projects already waiting in line.

Governor Greg Abbott has ordered the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to pause approvals until the agencies complete an audit of applicants, a move that could stall a large backlog of projects seeking to connect.

The state wants more information before granting access. Abbott said applicants must provide tax break details, power use and generation data, water use and cooling plans, steps to reduce community impact, and facility ownership information. Any project missing that information will not be allowed onto the grid.

Executive Summary:

On July 22 at 7:56:09 a.m. EDT, a Dominion Energy transmission line fault in Northern Virginia caused a cluster of data centers to instantaneously switch to backup power, removing roughly 3 gigawatts of demand from the grid. Ting Labs network of 1.4 million sensors captured the resulting frequency and voltage disturbance rippling across the entire Eastern Interconnection, affecting an estimated 100 million homes and 238 million people.

Crucially, the grid did not fail: PJM, Dominion, and regional utilities absorbed the imbalance, with the sharpest effects lasting about two minutes and full frequency recovery within roughly ten. The event is notable less for what went wrong than for its scale and speed, and it validates the need for real-time grid intelligence, close coordination between grid stakeholders and regulatory concerns about data center ride-through requirements to boost grid resilience.

Amazon is backing what could be the largest natural gas power plant ever built in the United States.

The company confirmed to Cleanview that it has acquired a site in Pecos County, Texas, where it plans to build an AI data center campus powered by on-site natural gas generation. Permits for the gas plant reveal that it would use 35 turbines to generate 7.65 gigawatts of power. It would be entirely disconnected from the Texas electricity grid — at least initially.

“Amazon believes in paying the full costs of powering our operations,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Our new planned data center campus in Pecos County does just that: it’s powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families and designed to transition to grid-connected service as interconnection timelines allow.”

 saw a recent announcement that the FCC’s Wireless Competition Bureau had approved the transfer of WideOpenWest (WOW) to Japan’s Softbank Group. WideOpenWest is the eighth-largest cable company, which operates under the brand name of WOW! The proposed transaction has Softbank buying the DigitalBridge Group, which is WOW!’s majority owner. This deal was announced at the…

Nexstar violated a preliminary injunction on its pending $6.2 billion merger with Tegna when it appointed its officials into the latter’s board of directors, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley said that the injunction, which he issued in April, does not allow current or former Nexstar personnel from serving on Tegna’s board. He ordered Nexstar to file a report within 10 days to ensure compliance.

A US judge in New Mexico on Thursday ordered Meta to pay another $567m (£421m) for its failure to warn the public about dangers its platforms posed to children, marking the largest ruling against the company over child safety.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid said the social media giant is a "public nuisance" akin to air pollution and that it must put the money in a fund aimed at reducing future harms.

The ruling is in addition to $375m in fines Meta was already ordered to pay in the case, for a total of $942m.

WASHINGTON — On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines to eliminate the 39 percent national television-ownership cap, a statute that the agency lacks the legal authority to repeal. Free Press and allies plan to appeal this unlawful decision in court.

Congress enshrined the national ownership cap in federal law; it prohibits a single company from owning TV stations that reach more than 39 percent of the national broadcast audience. The FCC does not have the power to get rid of this limit, but Chairman Brendan Carr decided to move ahead. His motivation is to remove a significant legal hurdle to further broadcast consolidation — specifically involving media conglomerates that are friendly to President Donald Trump and his far-right agenda.

The history of Donald Trump’s campaign of media censorship begins at the doorstep of the Federal Communications Commission.

This Corruption Walk documents the FCC chairman’s many abuses to show that he’s unfit to fulfill his sworn duty to defend a free press and serve the public interest.

This shameful history, recounted on a series of 11 signs, details the chairman’s corrupt attempts to silence and bully any media that refuse to bow to Trump’s anti-democratic White House agenda. The signs were displayed as the FCC convened its monthly open meeting, allowing attendees en route to read about the ways in which Carr has violated his oath of office.

A halt in Grokipedia’s edit pipeline offers a case study in how an AI-generated reference system governs its own content.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated reference systems are on their way to becoming a significant part of the infrastructure of public knowledge. Grokipedia, the encyclopedia xAI launched in October 2025 as a machine-written alternative to Wikipedia, is the clearest current example: Its entries are drafted and maintained by a large language model that decides not only what to write but also when to edit itself.

That is why it matters that Grokipedia appears not to have updated any articles since April 24. The encyclopedia stopped editing itself and processing suggested edits from humans. As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months.

AI sycophancy in high risk domains like law enforcement are under-analyzed, argues Tech Policy Press fellow Jake Laperruque.

Society’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence has given rise to concerns about AI sycophancy. This dark pattern—the tendency of AI systems to tailor responses to flatter users and validate their point of view—has alarming social ramifications: commentators worry it could warp human values and expectations or prop up reliance on digital yes men, and it's been documented amplifying dissociations and delusions. Beyond these general risks, we need to account for problems AI sycophancy may cause when the tech is applied to specific, high-risk functions. In particular, we ought to examine how it could impact the use of AI in policing.

AI is becoming incorporated into an array of law enforcement tasks as a virtual assistant.