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The Aitkin Age reports… No major data center projects are currently proposed or planned in Aitkin County, however, the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy said, “More than 20 large hyperscale and AI data centers have been proposed across Minnesota, with key projects located in Rosemount, Farmington and Pine Island. Tech companies are targeting Minnesota for its cool climate, available land and clean energy goals, though these projects face growing local pushback over massive water and power use."
In 1890, two landmark bills passed and were signed into law by Republican president Benjamin Harrison. That year, both the Sherman Antitrust Act and the McKinley Tariff simultaneously defined American antitrust law and established a historic tariff to protect American producers. This was no coincidence. For Republicans in the post-Civil War era, tariffs and industrialization were top priorities—but protectionism risked creating or strengthening industrial monopolies by insulating domestic firms from foreign competition. The discipline once provided by foreign firms needed to come from elsewhere: antitrust enforcement. The U.S. is facing a similar challenge today: Tariffs are back after years of globalization let our antitrust muscles go soft, as the enforcer’s job was done by foreign competitors, with considerable consequences. In agriculture, for example, tariffs have walled off the economy from foreign imports and therefore muted competition for key inputs including fertilizers and equipment, putting the squeeze on America’s farmers. Across the economy, the same antitrust logic that applied in the Gilded Age applies today: tariffs and trustbusting must go hand-in-hand. If imported products become more expensive because of tariffs, the thinking went, domestic producers would face less pressure to lower prices, innovate, or expand output. This logic built the case for antitrust enforcement against some of the most powerful companies in the country at the time, including Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the meatpackers. For Republicans, antitrust was the pragmatic response to the inevitable loss of competition created by the tariffs. Indeed, some historians argue the first antitrust law, the Sherman Act of 1890, partly functioned as a political safety valve, allowing Republicans to preserve the tariff system while responding to popular anti-monopoly sentiment.
Charter’s Spectrum leads the world in Wi-Fi 7 traffic. Explore new Speedtest data on U.S. Wi-Fi 7 adoption across fiber and cable ISPs, speed gains, and FCC impacts. Prototypes for Wi-Fi 8 are imminent and its commercial availability is expected in just two years. Debate about Wi-Fi 9 standards is already underway among industry pundits. And yet the uptake of Wi-Fi 7, the latest generation of Wi-Fi technology presently in the market, is only just beginning to see meaningful traction in the U.S.
Jumping off from Ookla’s recent report on The Global State of Wi-Fi , this article focuses on the U.S. and updates last year’s Wi-Fi 7 Speeds Up in the U.S. report. Key takeaways:
The Patriot reports… Comcast is expanding reliable, high-speed Internet to nearly 1,000 homes and businesses in Mayer, bringing its multi-gigabit, symmetrical Internet to the community. Construction is scheduled to begin in August, and the project is expected to be completed by fall 2027. Once complete, Comcast’s full suite of residential Xfinity services will be available in Mayer, including high-speed Internet, streaming, mobile, voice and home security — delivering reliable, connected experiences for today’s consumers at home or on the go.
The obligations promise more accountability, but applying them to AI chatbots and gaming platforms raises new questions, writes Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat. On August 31, the European Commission designated OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE) and named Roblox and Reddit Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) under the Digital Services Act (DSA). Four months from now, these services will have to comply with additional obligations, including that they must: - assess and mitigate the systemic risks their services generate
- submit to annual independent audits
- open their internal data to vetted researchers
- give users at least one content recommendation system not based on profiling
- publish a repository of the advertisements they run
- release biannual public reports on their content moderation
These new requirements kick in anytime an online platform or search engine becomes “very large,” meaning that it reaches at least 45 million average monthly users in the EU. The implications are substantial, particularly for transparency.
Tech Policy Press fellow Jake Laperruque spoke to Rep. Lofgren (D-Calif.) about FISA, surveillance, and the Fourth Amendment. Last week, I spoke to Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, about the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and ongoing efforts to reform it. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion. Jake Laperruque: I'm really delighted to be joined here today by Representative Zoe Lofgren. She's a longtime champion on privacy, surveillance, and a whole host of technology issues. Congresswoman Lofgren, thank you so much for joining us today. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.): Thanks for having me. Jake Laperruque: Great. So we're going to talk today primarily about FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, specifically the warrantless provision of FISA, FISA Section 702. So for listeners who aren't too familiar with FISA in general or aren't too familiar with FISA 702, could you give them just a brief summary of what this surveillance authority is, and why Congress needs to take action on this issue?
Kathy Schmitz, the executive director of the Vilas County Economic Development Corporation (VCEDC), has announced her retirement at the end of 2026, concluding more than six years of leadership that transformed the regional economy. Schmitz, who joined the VCEDC in November 2019, will leave a legacy defined by massive infrastructure expansion, new educational initiatives, and increased financial resources for local businesses. Under Schmitz’s collaborative leadership, Vilas County saw its county-wide broadband coverage expand from just 5% to 86%. To cement this progress, she spearheaded the Midwest “Northwoods Charm. Big City Connection.” broadband advertising campaign to market the county as a premier destination for connected remote workers.
Northern News Now reports... Some businesses are pulling out of the Duluth Area Chamber of Commerce, after the agency put its support behind the proposed Hermantown data center this week. Now both Zenith Bookstore and Townline Farms & Stable have now severed ties with the Chamber. The departures are due to a move these local business owners call a devastating betrayal and misrepresentation of small businesses in the organization.
On Tuesday, The Duluth Area Chamber of Commerce formally announced their support of the proposed data center.
Minnesota Star Tribune reports…. Google’s controversial northeast Minnesota data center proposal has “gaps” and “deficiencies,” the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources said of its final environmental review. But the agency stopped short of objecting to it. In a late August letter to the city of Hermantown the state agency wrote that the second environmental review of the forested 234-acre site leaves several questions unanswered. But as the governmental unit in charge of the project, state law dictates the city has the legal authority to decide whether the review is adequate. Its City Council could vote on it this month. The specifics from the DNR…
They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don’t have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that’s not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded. The VCR was one of the fastest-adopted technologies in the history of the world, and it was disruptive. The fact that you could record shows to watch later, skip the ads, build a library of your favorites, even loan your tapes around — it drove the studios and broadcasters nuts. The VCR hit the market under a cloud of litigation, and the lawsuits went all the way up to the Supreme Court, culminating with 1984’s Betamax decision, whose key precept is that a new technology doesn’t violate copyright law if it can “sustain a substantial, non-infringing use”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc. As important as the VCR was as a device — creating the home video market, which begat DVDs, then streaming — the Betamax decision is even more important. You see, copyright is a “fact-intensive” doctrine, which means that determining whether a use is or isn’t a copyright violation can be a complex and expensive process of gathering facts, weighing conflicting expert views to arrive at a judgment.
The president’s decree is dumb. Why is anyone going along with it? Apple Computer has had good marketing very nearly from the beginning. During the 1984 Superbowl, the then-upstart computer company ran what has become one of the most legendary ads in the industry’s history, directed by Ridley Scott and invoking the imagery of George Orwell’s 1984. At a time when the public was still skeptical about computers and their growing role in society, Apple managed to make the home PC feel liberatory: the ad ends with a heroic woman hurling a sledgehammer through a giant screen dispensing authoritarian propaganda, as a voiceover told the audience at home that they’d soon be able to buy the Apple Macintosh computer, “and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.” Four decades later, and Apple — following the lead of other tech giants like Google — is literally redrawing the map of the world because of the unhinged say-so of the current occupant of the White House. The president wants Lake Ontario to be called “Lake America,” and our tech overlords are happy to comply. Everyone involved should be deeply ashamed of this behaviour, but Apple’s specific corporate history makes this somehow even sadder. The attempted defense that these companies are simply pulling place names off a government server that Donald Trump happens to control might have been defensible before January 20, 2025, when Trump “renamed” the Gulf of Mexico. (Do I think the Lake Ontario thing is more offensive than the Gulf of Mexico thing? Not really, but I’m paid to cover Ontario and not Mexico, so here we are.) They’ve had 18 months to revise their policies in the face of this president’s corruption of their data, and they’ve chosen not to. That is, in fact, a choice, and one that appears as alignment with a president who has persecuted journalists who insisted on the correct geographical name for the Gulf of Mexico. This is not something so trivial that it should be laughed off: these trillion-dollar corporations have put themselves on the wrong side of the basic right to freedom of speech. As far Apple is concerned, we have always been at war with Eastasia, at least if Donald Trump says so.
Federal News Network reports… When it comes to cybersecurity, Minnesota has been ahead of the curve. It used grant money from the Department of Homeland Security and other funding to create MNet – an enterprise telecommunications network that connects state and local government and education offices throughout the state. Now, Minnesota is taking the “whole of state” cybersecurity effort even further.
SpaceX and other companies want to put millions of satellites into space. Could orbit run out of room? Seven years ago, when Samantha Lawler moved to rural Saskatchewan to run a farm with her partner, the glorious darkness overhead was one of the biggest perks. Undiminished by light pollution, countless stars filled the night sky. It was a pristine celestial view that city dwellers can only dream of seeing. That matters a lot to Lawler, who studies the universe as an astronomer at the nearby University of Regina when she’s not tending goats and chickens. Yet ever since Lawler’s rural relocation, a new type of artificial star has increasingly encroached on the heavens above her homestead: satellites, constellations of them, most beaming the Internet around the globe. “Now there are many satellites all the time,” Lawler says. “I really could notice the change that was happening.” In 2019, the same year Lawler moved to Saskatchewan, Texas-based SpaceX began launching its Starlink megaconstellation in earnest, lofting an initial 60 satellites into orbit that May. The constellation has since exploded in size. This past March, SpaceX reached a milestone of 10,000 active Starlink satellites. More than 10 million customers worldwide now use its Internet service. Other companies and countries are racing to catch up. There are plans to put nearly two million satellites in orbit. If even a fraction of those launch, it will make the current crop of about 15,000 satellites look paltry by comparison.
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Verizon harmed America’s East Coast; not just in one or two states, but from Massachusetts down through Virginia. After reading a number of Verizon’s state summaries of how great the company is and how well they have been serving each state, I noticed a pattern. Originally published, HuffPost, Jun 21, 2015, |Updated Dec 6, 2017 We post this because Verizon has stated that there are only 277,000 residential and business legacy voice lines left in 2026 — if only 40+% of the lines were ever converted to fiber, and these are households passed, then what are the other 60% of current lines? We note there was some additional FiOS deployments but most stopped years ago and FiOS is now sometimes a wireless bait and switch for FWA wireless. Bead deployments, state deployments, cities also occurred but the question should be — what happened over the last decade and how many lines are still copper and can be turned off, is the real question. NOTE: Some of the links may no longer work. Post Summer Reading: “The Book of Broken Promises; $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net” Definition of “Weasel Room”: Using specific terms, words or phrases with ‘selective’ accounting to distort, puff up or obfuscate the facts. Verizon harmed America’s East Coast; not just in one or two states, but from Massachusetts down through Virginia. Using Verizon’s own press releases, combined with U.S. Census and FCC data, here’s the reality:
Somebody recently asked me about the origins of telephone numbers. I told them to search my blog, assuming I must have written about numbering some time over the years – but I hadn’t. The original purpose of a telephone number was to identify a specific customer. When telephones first came into use, they could only be used to call people in the immediate area who could be connected by the local neighborhood operator. Callers identified who they wanted to talk to by name. The idea of using telephone numbers started in 1879 in Lowell, Massachusetts, when the town was suffering from a measles epidemic. Dr. Moses Greeley Parker suggested that the operators assign a number to each of the 200 subscribers so that substitute operators would be able to complete calls if the normal operators became ill. Dr. Parker was so impressed by the telephone’s potential that he began buying stock and became one of the early largest shareholders in the American Telephone Company and New England Telephone and Telegraph.
Tucked inside the landmark settlement is another settlement, writes Jason Kint. There was a curious word buried in yesterday’s eye-popping 130-page, $17 billion settlement between Meta and 52 states and territories over harms to children. “Cambridge.” It appears 45 times, to be precise. But why? Well, tucked inside the landmark settlement is another settlement. Meta is also paying $459,293,017.80 (love that eighty cents) to resolve state claims arising from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Odd? Yes. The child harms settlement doesn’t treat Cambridge Analytica as a mere footnote. It separately and meticulously defines the “Cambridge Complaints,” “Cambridge Releasors,” “Cambridge Settlement Amount” and “Cambridge Settling States.” An entire exhibit E allocates the nearly $459.3 million among 46 states and two territories. In exchange, the states broadly release Meta from Cambridge Analytica-related claims, including future claims based on facts that aren’t yet known. You are now effectively immune from your biggest scandal in history to date, Meta. Congratulations. Cambridge Analytica may feel like a scandal from another era.
Replacing one system of surveillance with another isn't a win. And the system some cities are replacing their Flock cameras with could be even more intrusive. There's been a great deal of backlash against Flock cameras, with constant vandalism and numerous reports of crooked cops misusing them, leading to more and more communities to cancel their contracts. While Flock has received the most backlash, there are other ALPR companies out there. Rather than ending their use of technology that spies on you, and in a move that doesn't really solve the problems associated with mass surveillance, some departments that have dropped Flock have simply switched to other companies that do the same thing, reports NPR. One of those competitors is Axon. If that name sounds familiar, it's probably because you've seen it displayed on body cam videos, since Axon is the leading supplier of body cams to law enforcement, according to The Intercept. After a bit of rebranding in 2017 (the same year Flock was founded), many people don't know that Axon is the company formerly known as Taser, the electrical stun gun — another technology that police never, ever misuse.
The designation could have far-reaching implications for frontier labs' products and for the EU's own rulebook, write Mathias Vermeulen and Laureline Lemoine. On August 31, the European Commission designated OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE), placing the chatbot under the Digital Services Act's (DSA) most stringent tier of obligations. This decision was long in the making – in fact, we explored different options for how the EC could do this in an extensive paper three years ago. This designation could have far-reaching implications, both for frontier labs' products and for the EU's own rulebook. Many of the questions it raises will only be answered as the Commission's supervision unfolds over the coming months. The decision confirms the DSA's technological neutrality, or at least its ability to bring new kinds of services, ones that didn't exist when it was drafted, within scope.
On Wednesday, a federal judge in Virginia issued an order on remedies in the Google ad-tech antitrust case. I’m disappointed in the order, and you should be, too. Yes, you, even if you’re not a policy wonk like me. In the fall of 2024, I wrote a post for Tech Policy Press explaining why, despite all its legal complexities, the Google ad tech case matters for everyone. Leveraging my own ringside seat to the development and evolution of digital advertising since the 1990’s, I made the case that “Google’s dominant control of the advertising technology market has hurt advertisers and publishers… but also consumers – by imposing on privacy, fueling disinformation, reducing the diversity of viewpoints online, increasing barriers to news, reducing innovation by brands, and increasing prices on goods and services.” Judge Leonie Brinkema’s remedies order means Google’s dominant control of the advertising technology market will continue – and so, likely, will its detrimental impacts. Google is an illegal monopolist in advertising technology. That was Judge Brinkema’s decision in her April 2025 ruling in the antitrust lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice and several states in 2023.
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) — An Atlanta-headquartered technology company is facing a sweeping federal class-action lawsuit alleging its nationwide vehicle surveillance network violates the privacy rights of millions of everyday drivers. The lawsuit, filed Aug. 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, accuses Flock Group Inc. (Flock Safety) of building an unchecked, pervasive surveillance grid. The system, which operates more than 120,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras across the country, reportedly captures and stores billions of vehicle scans every month.
Gloucester County residents are facing several changes to telephone and broadband services, including the potential loss of traditional Verizon landlines and the end of Open Broadband’s fixed-wireless internet service. County officials said the changes could be especially difficult for residents in rural areas with limited options for phone and internet service. Verizon landline service The county has received reports from residents who were notified by Verizon that their traditional copper-line landline service will be discontinued. Officials said there is no indication that all Verizon customers in Gloucester County will lose service on the same date. The timing and replacement options may vary by address. Residents who receive a notice from Verizon should contact the company to find out when their current service will end and what replacement options are available. The county also recommends residents ask whether they can keep their current phone number, what the replacement service will cost and what equipment is required. Residents should also ask how the replacement service will handle 911 calls, whether backup power is needed during an outage and whether the service will work with medical-alert devices, security or fire alarms, fax machines or other equipment. Verizon owns and operates its telephone network, and the county does not control decisions about its copper infrastructure.
Amazon’s own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money. Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There’s its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers’ labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon’s platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods. This means that it costs Amazon itself nothing to get the merchandise it sells to your door: more than 100% of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon is covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who compete with Amazon in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit). Then there’s AWS, Amazon’s cloud business.
Some appreciations and reflections about our inaugural year. As we head into the Labor Day weekend, and near our one-year anniversary of our official launch of Pressing Issues, we thought it would be a good time to check in with our readers and take a moment to thank you for being part of what we hope has become a destination to share ideas and analysis about everything happening at the intersection of media, technology and democracy. Before we take a break and get back to publication next Friday, we wanted to share how much we have accomplished so far:
The Golden State Connect Authority has signed an agreement with FiberTel for the design and construction of multiple county projects within the Golden State Fiber broadband network, which aims to expand last-mile connectivity across rural California. Under the agreement, FiberTel will design and build fiber deployments in Mono County and the Town of Mammoth Lakes, as well as Alpine, Amador, Imperial and Tehama counties. The company will also complete Phase 2 of the network buildout in Glenn County, where GSCA broke ground on Phase 1 in April 2026. Across these initial project areas, the network will span approximately 1,065 miles of fiber infrastructure.
On August 25, the Trump administration Commerce Department finally approved Illinois’s spending plan under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. Illinois was the last straggler of the 56 states and territories to receive clearance under the $42.5 billion internet funding program. “With all 56 Final Proposals now approved, we are achieving Congress’s vision of closing the digital divide once and for all,” said Arielle Roth, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which administers the program. Illinois was last because NTIA kept sending its plan back.
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