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For the main podcast, we have something of a Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses bumper episode this week. We start with Joseph and Jason’s piece on a $60 mod that disables the privacy-protecting recording light in the smart glasses.
After the break, Emanuel tells us how some people are abusing the glasses to film massage workers, and he explains the difference between a phone and a pair of smartglasses, if you need that spelled out for you. In the subscribers-only section, Jason tells us about the future of advertising: AI-generated ads personalized directly to you.
Comcast reported 104K broadband subscriber losses in Q3 and named Steve Croney as the Connectivity & Platforms chief
Croney is a driving force behind the operator's new pricing strategy, said Recon Analytics' Roger Entner
Execs on the call also alluded corporate restructuring is underway
Comcast’s third quarter broadband results were surprisingly not too shabby, as the company exceeded analyst expectations with only 104,000 broadband customer losses.
The welcome news also came with an announcement that Steve Croney, current COO of Comcast’s Connectivity & Platforms, will succeed Dave Watson as CEO of the division effective January 1.
To protect economic and public safety interests, regulators, legislators, law enforcement, municipalities, and communications providers must work together.
Rachelle Faust and Daniel Arnaudo discuss how independent research on social media platforms is vanishing as data access shrinks, deepening global inequities.
The campaign has drawn scrutiny, with critics saying the agency is not realistically portraying the diversity of the country and is sending messages that feel exclusionary, given that White men make up a minority of the workforce.
A year ago, the Labor Department’s social media messaging focused heavily on portraying a diverse assortment of employees and laborers, both in gender and race.
But the agency has made a dramatic shift during the Trump administration, launching a social media campaign with illustrations that appear to be AI-generated and that almost exclusively feature White men — part of an effort to promote the hiring of American citizens over foreign workers.
Art experts and historians say the images mimic the styles of artist Norman Rockwell or historical government propaganda, including posters from New Deal-era America and fascist Europe.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23, 2025 – Senior officials from the government’s top telecom regulators said Wednesday that artificial intelligence was becoming central to both agencies’ operations.
The Federal Communications Commission’s chief AI officer Arpan Sura said the agency’s goal was to use AI "to be faster [and more accurate] in decision making,” while also “making the lives of staff easier.”
Zohran Mamdani will be the mayor of New York City, and he's invited Lina Khan to help. For new leaders in NYC, Virginia, and NJ, delivering means going at the monopolies making it hard to govern.
The City Assembly of Toyoake, Japan, a city with 68,000 residents, recently introduced a rule limiting the use of digital devices to two hours per day outside of work and school. The idea was introduced by mayor Masafumi Kouki. He’s grown concerned that residents, particularly children, have become addicted to digital devices. The new law…
The Trump FCC has announced that it's taking formal steps to weaken or eliminate the rules as part of the agency’s broad, frontal assault on consumer protections. On October 30, the The Trump FCC under Brendan Carr voted in favor of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to eliminate or weaken the rules; especially requirements that ISPs transparently detail itemized fees buried in their advertised prices.
Superior, Wisconsin’s community-owned open access fiber network has gone live in its first two deployment neighborhoods, as the city works toward providing affordable next-generation fiber access to the city’s long under-served community of 26,000. The city’s open access network means that multiple broadband providers can compete over the same shared infrastructure and so far two independent ISPs are offering retail service to residents.
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. and HAWTHORNE, Calif., Nov. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- EchoStar has entered into an amended definitive agreement with SpaceX to sell the company's unpaired AWS-3 licenses for approximately $2.6 billion in SpaceX stock valued as of September 2025. This transaction builds on the agreement the companies entered into in September. EchoStar's unpaired AWS-3 licenses are nationwide and are part of 3GPP Band 70n (1695-1710 MHz uplink).
Amy Wasserman and her husband were stunned when the energy bill for their home in Wilmington, Del., topped $500 in September — the highest it had ever been and almost double what they typically pay. They say they’ve done nearly everything experts advise to cut energy use: installed new windows and ductless heat pumps, upgraded to efficient appliances and sealed their basement. “Yet the bill continues to go up,” Ms. Wasserman told me.
Dale Williams and his wife, who’ve lived in the same house in New Jersey for 30 years, opened their August bill to find a charge of $766 (over $250 higher than what’s typical for them that month). Their electricity costs have climbed even though their use hasn’t changed meaningfully from previous years.
After nearly two decades of relatively flat prices, U.S. residential electricity rates have risen sharply since 2022, with increases of more than 20 percent in some states. It’s happening at the same time as, but not always as a result of, a surge in power demand from new factories, electric vehicles and heaters and, of course, data centers and the artificial intelligence companies that rely on them.
To understand how the price spikes land on real families, Times Opinion invited readers to share their electricity bills. Dozens did, and their stories revealed just how helpless many people feel to stop the increases. Their experiences also expose a deeper problem: a power system where every uptick in demand triggers costly new infrastructure instead of better management of what we’ve already built. Something has to change.
Voters rejected Trump the same way they've rejected incumbents for 20 years. Enough with the bubbles! Plus, health care industry wins the gov't shutdown and Trump may lose his tariff authority, and Disney and Google feud over which monopolist gets to control sports programming. Also, Lina Khan content now goes way more viral than that of Barack Obama.
But this week, the most important story are the results of the elections Tuesday, which I suspect reflect a deep dissatisfaction not just with Trump, but with American economic strategy since the mid-2000s. Here’s pollster G. Elliot Morris describing the key dynamic: “Among voters who said the economy was their top issue, partisan trust on the economy moved 93 points toward Democrats between 2024 and this year’s New Jersey and Virginia elections.” In addition, this week, Trump’s disapproval collapsed, moving from an average of negative 7.5% for most of his first year to negative 13% just this week.
These shifts, while large, make sense, and actually track what happened to Joe Biden. Indeed, Trump’s politics in some ways mirror those of Biden. For instance, during the Biden era, Democrats obsessed over niche identity questions and ignored the real economy, throwing a few crumbs towards an industrial policy, which is to say subsidies for chips, batteries, and solar panels, and a bit of antitrust. Wall Street and big tech did very well, and prices were high. The result was that Republicans over-performed.
For more than a decade, Silicon Valley venture capitalists have poured enormous sums of money into newfangled technology companies seeking to disrupt, and even supplant, the traditional financial system and sidestep its burdensome regulations.
At the same time, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has policed that effort, going after such businesses for deceiving, overcharging or otherwise taking advantage of their customers by enacting rules, filing lawsuits and shutting down the worst offenders.
This cat-and-mouse game has long rankled tech leaders, but it has especially irritated Marc Andreessen, one of America’s most well-known investors and an outsize figure in the so-called fintech industry.
Of particular concern to Andreessen was federal regulators’ targeting of the freewheeling crypto industry under President Joe Biden — an effort that legal experts said would have planted a costly roadblock in the path of several companies’ rapid growth. The investor’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, told the CFPB last year it planned to put more than $7 billion in crypto funds. So in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, the longtime Democrat shifted his allegiance to Donald Trump, donating more than $5 million to groups supporting the Republican candidate, and even volunteered to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Ever since, Andreessen and others have seen their desires realized.
Lawsuits have been dropped and settlements renegotiated in favor of companies as the administration guts the CFPB.
Remember the broadband “nutrition” labels ISPs are required to show consumers? The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as part of its ongoing campaign to "delete" regulations, could soon change what’s on the label and how it’s presented.
The FCC kicked off a proceeding to eliminate certain broadband label requirements and is seeking comment on whether it should streamline or remove any other rules that are “unduly burdensome and provide minimal benefit to consumers.”
The number of layoffs in the U.S. this year has surged past 1 million, new data shows
Several telecom and tech giants have been among those letting workers go
Fierce tallied up where things stood in terms of layoffs and headcount as of this week
The U.S. job market is sailing through rough seas at the moment. Cuts for the full year have surged past the 1 million mark and the month of October saw the highest number of layoffs in 20 years, according to new data from career change firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
So, what does this mean for telecom and tech employees? Well, we took a look at some of the biggest players to provide a rundown of where cuts have happened and how these giants are thinking about headcount moving forward.
Around $21 billion of the federal broadband program could be left over, according to recent research, which also found that as many as 1 million locations could still be unserved.
The recent remarks by NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth at the Hudson Institute should alarm every rural community hoping for high-speed fiber connectivity through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. The administration's new requirement that BEAD recipients certify they will not need any federal operational subsidies threatens to undermine the very purpose of this historic $42.45 billion investment—connecting the hardest-to-serve Americans.
CBAN's Curtis Dean breaks it all down on this edition of Broadband Action.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to vote on a proposal to explore ways to reconfigure the Upper C-band (3.98GHz to 4.2GHz) so it can be auctioned for 5G and 6G services.
That plan squares with the FCC's mandate to free up and auction 800MHz of spectrum in the coming years as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Within that mandate, the FCC is directed to complete a system of competitive bidding for at least 100MHz of the upper C-band in less than two years.
The FCC is looking to go above and beyond that. Per the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) being circulated by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, the Commission will seek comment on multiple options, including the potential to auction up to 180MHz in the upper C-band.
But even that is sort of a compromise. The CTIA, along with major carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, had asked the FCC to open up as much as 220MHz of upper C-band spectrum. That mid-band spectrum is particularly valuable in that it provides both capacity and reach.
The privacy changes web browsers will be required to make under a new California law could set the de facto standard for the entire country, changing how Americans control their data when using the internet, according to experts.
Chris Mitchell, Karl Bode, and Sean Gonsalves break down the politics, corruption, and power plays shaping the broadband landscape—and what it all means for communities fighting for real Internet choice
Legal analysts are questioning the recent assertion by the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) that the agency can legally withhold federal broadband deployment funds from states that have laws enforcing net neutrality or that have enacted affordable broadband legislation. Last week in speaking before the conservative Hudson Institute, NTIA administrator Arielle Roth offered remarks that have legal observers scratching their heads in bewilderment.
Financials bloomed for the hyperscalers after recent system failures. Is it time to treat them like carriers?
In the view of analyst John Strand, this position of privilege comes from a lack of accountability for the hyperscalers when systems go awry. According to a recent Strand Consult report, AWS escapes the kinds of statutory obligations telecoms have, such as universal service contributions, minimum backup and reliability rules, and public filing of tariffs.
New study shows how fiber networks protect lives and keep communities connected before, during, and after disasters
Bolton presented a view on the major technology innovation tipping points that will be fueled by critical fiber optic infrastructure. During his discussion, he provided an overview on the progress of the fiber build out in the U.S., including an update on the $42.45B government subsidy funding...
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