The long-sought program could ease cost and climate risks — especially if it lets renewable energy secured by tech giants avert a big buildout of gas…

Traverse City, Michigan’s public, community-owned utility, Traverse City Light and Power (TCL&P), is putting the finishing touches on its $14 million plan to deliver affordable fiber to the community of 15,424. With build out estimates significantly lower than initial projections, the utility is finalizing an additional $1 million in loans to fund the recently started build.

A detailed investigation reveals that the e-commerce
behemoth Amazon is using its market dominance and political influence to gain a foothold in local governments' purchasing systems, locking school districts into contracts that let the corporation drive up prices for pens, sticky notes, and other basic supplies.

The new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), titled Turning Public Money Into Amazon’s Profits: The Hidden Cost of Ceding Government Procurement to a Monopoly Gatekeeper, is based on purchasing records from nearly 130 cities representing more than 50 million Americans.

Netflix announced early Friday morning that it has an $82.7 billion deal in place to acquire most of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), a company that’s itself a flailing and failing product of several previously touted mega-mergers.

Netflix is the big winner in a bidding war with Comcast and Larry Ellison & Son’s Paramount. But it’s hard to have much of a rooting interest in the Mind Flayers vs. the Nepo Babies because the losers in mega-deals like this are always creators, writers, workers and the rest of us sitting in the audience.

Legendary activist and actor Jane Fonda published an Op-Ed in The Ankler on Thursday before the deal was officially announced, warning of the dangers of a WBD takeover by any of these suitors and urging her fellow creators to speak out.

Public Knowledge, Free Press and TechFreedom staged a protest outside of the 2025 Federal Communications Bar Association's annual dinner.

On the evening of December 3, the Federal Communications Bar Association (FCBA) held its 37th Annual Dinner, hosting more than 1,500 telecommunications and technology policy professionals – including some of Public Knowledge’s own staff. As in years past, the Federal Communications Commission chair is a featured speaker, and many FCC staffers, including its commissioners, attend the dinner. 

Public Knowledge staff who normally attend the dinner asserted that attending this year felt different. The FCBA dinner is, at least partly, intended to raise money to provide college scholarships to students – an important cause to ensure a robust pipeline of quality graduates find their way into the tech policy space (including to organizations like Public Knowledge). But it also gives the FCC chair a platform for a speech in the form of a comedic set.

At a time when Chairman Brendan Carr has been using regulatory power to silence President Trump’s critics and reward his allies, including attacks on Jimmy Kimmel (which temporarily forced the comedian’s show off the air in September) and new attacks on Seth Meyers, another late-night comedian, just last month, we bristled at the idea of Chairman Carr using his right to free speech in a standup performance while bullying comedians for doing the same. Chairman Carr has not hesitated to publicly threaten to punish media who step “out of line” by revoking their broadcast licenses.

Chairman Carr’s threats clearly weaponize the agency against media who disagree with the Trump administration – and they also clearly strike at the First Amendment protection of free speech and a free press. 

The European Commission announced Friday that it was fining Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, for the equivalent of $140 million, saying his company X had breached Europe’s Digital Services Act. The act, which took effect around the same time Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, is a kind of digital rulebook meant to crack down on illegal or potentially harmful content. 

Vice President JD Vance, before the fine was even finalized, slammed the commission, claiming that it was targeting US companies. 

Executive Summary

Major players in the wireless industry are disputing EchoStar/DISH’s attempt to claim force majeure to excuse them from lease obligations. Local governments, and traditional real estate owners, should be aware of the litigation and consider the potential outcome before accepting DISH’s claims. 

Background

A U.S. Department of Justice condition on T-Mobile’s 2019 acquisition of Sprint was the divestiture or sale of some Sprint-held spectrum. The required sale was to support a fourth national facilities-based wireless carrier – and thus was born “DISH Wireless.” During the past five years, DISH sought to build out a national network, but in August 2025, EchoStar, the satellite company that merged with DISH in 2024, pivoted. The company announced the sale of spectrum licenses to AT&T and plans to operate as a hybrid mobile network operator (MNO) using AT&T’s network for connectivity under the label Boost Mobile.  

COMMENTARY | A new federal program to transform rural healthcare will rely on patients and providers having strong internet, otherwise we risk deepening existing disparities.

The words on everyone’s mind, in discussions about AI’s diffusion through the economy, are “fear” and “trust.” There’s too much “fear” of AI, you see, especially from workers. The important thing is to build people’s “trust” in the technology. These shortcomings of the American proletariat are typically lamented with some combination of condescension and frustration at the failure to comprehend the promise of progress and the imperative to pursue it. And they are contrasted with the brave, bold, forward-looking attitude in China, where enthusiastic citizens are embracing the opportunity… to do things like strap brain-monitoring headbands on elementary school students.

But perhaps American workers are fearful of technological disruption because “experts” have spent the last generation telling them that technological disruption is responsible for their hardship. As I observed back in 2018 and have been arguing ever since:

What people do in their homes is no one’s business but their own. But in multiple residential buildings across San Francisco, landlords have forced tenants to accept so-called “smart

home” systems that monitor their comings and goings and other behavior. And they are using tenants’ personal information to track them, potentially even profiling their behavior with AI tools built specially for landlords. 

Today, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and our legal partners Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP and Tobener Ravenscroft LLP, sued landlord Equity Residential and surveillance technology vendor SmartRent in San Francisco Superior Court for violating tenants’ constitutional privacy rights in their homes.