Throughout this year, I’ve been hearing the phrase “good enough broadband” to describe consumers willing to take slower, less robust broadband connections in order to save money. This is most commonly used when referring to FWA broadband, but I’ve seen big ISP executives using the phrase when talking about customers who leave fiber for any slower technology.

This is not a new phenomenon. I recall statistics from five years ago that showed that up to 25% of customers in cities still bought DSL delivered over copper. At best, urban DSL had download speeds of 100 Mbps, but the majority of DSL was a lot slower than that, with most urban customers seeing download speeds between 25 Mbps and 50 Mbps. Cable companies always tried to win over the DSL customers, but cable was always a lot more expensive than DSL.

Pennsylvania offers a particular case study in which to consider the political battle over data centers that is playing out across the United States and beyond.

A new report from Data & Society, "The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania," draws on a year and a half of fieldwork across the state.

It examines how boosters sell data centers by invoking Pennsylvania's industrial past, and why so many communities aren't buying the promises made by industry and politicians.

I spoke with Data & Society's Maia Woluchem and Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes and with organizer Hannah Sassaman about the findings.

On "This Week," former FTC Chair Lina Khan called on Congress to help regulate AI.

“We need to remember what happened a decade ago, where you had big tech companies, social media companies, similarly suggest that existing laws and regulations no longer apply to their new technologies, and that they were going to try instead to self-police,” Khan said Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“We've seen just innumerable harms come from the unchecked domination of these big tech companies, and so now as we face new horizons with these advanced AI systems, it would be an enormous mistake to repeat that playbook," Khan continued.

There is a simple message behind this week's image: Oliver Twist holds out an empty bowl marked "DATA" and asks for more. Increasingly, that could be us.

Every AI prompt, card payment, stream, cloud backup, Teams call and medical scan is another serving of compute. The cloud feels bottomless because, for most of us, it has always behaved that way.

But somebody still has to keep serving it.

Most of us can remember running out of mobile data before month-end. Everything slowed, stopped or suddenly became expensive. Now imagine that frustration at an infrastructure scale.

That's where this week's discussion begins. Not simply whether we need more data centres, but whether the next generation need to be better data centres, using power, water, land and networks more intelligently, if we expect the servings to keep coming.

On Tuesday, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters, upholding the company's landmark win in a copyright infringement case against the now-defunct legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. The ruling marks the first federal appeals case to reject a fair use argument for usingpublisher content, without permission or compensation, to train a commercial AI product.

“The undisputed evidence reflects that Thomson Reuters’s materials possess a creative spark, and ROSS aspired to be a direct competitor by using them for a highly similar purpose,” wrote Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves, who sits on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, in her decision.

The company announced it has stopped using secret agreements with county officials and acknowledged that community backlash is leading to data center moratoriums across the country.

The Voice of Alexandria reports…

Amazon is investing more than $1 billion over the next five years into communities where it operates data centers for education, job training, water and energy preservation projects and other local priorities as it reacts to a growing backlash from politicians and consumers to the tech industry's rollout of the massive buildings.

According to a blog post on Friday by Matt Garman, Amazon’s CEO of its cloud computing arm, Amazon has already spent more than $1 billion in communities with a large data center presence over the past three years.

Maverix Broadband is disputing findings by the Colorado Broadband Office (CBO) that the internet service provider (ISP) mismanaged public funds.

Through a response shared with The Colorado Sun, Maverix Broadband told the newspaper that it “disputes every calculation, determination and finding” in the CBO’s Comprehensive Monitoring Report, released Sept. 21.

On September 21, the Colorado Broadband Office announced they were terminating six grants and rescinding over $100 million in provisionally awarded Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding that was destined for the company.

The ISP, which the CBO said was placed into receivership before a formal cancellation could be issued, was the subject of two whistleblower reports received in late May, CBO stated.

DHS agents not only tracked and intimidated people observing ICE activity in Maine, but stored information about them in a Palantir-built database, newly unsealed court filings say.

An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers—including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information—and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir.

Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

ROANOKE, Va. (WDBJ) - Verizon’s copper-based landlines are staying in place for now, after the Federal Communications Commission put the company’s phase-out plan on hold.

Verizon announced earlier this year that it planned to phase out copper landlines in favor of newer technology, including fiberoptics or wireless connections. Late last week, the FCC paused that plan, saying it needs more time to review the proposal.

Customers describe reliance on landlines

The FCC has paused Verizon's plan to retire copper landlines. Rural customers and 6th District candidates Ben Cline and Beth Macy react. 

Cell service can be spotty in rural stretches of the area. Genevieve Henderson, a 91-year-old Verizon customer, said she has to walk outside to get a signal.

As NTIA opens a second BEAD funding round, former FCC official and consultant Carol Mattey shares some open questions and potential complications ahead.

While broadband advocates appear to broadly support the NTIA's move to open up a supplemental funding round to reach remaining unserved BEAD locations, it's also clear that many are concerned and curious about how that process will unfold from here.

"Big picture, NTIA is recognizing that things change," said Carol Mattey, former FCC official and founder of Mattey Consulting, in a conversation hosted by the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA). That, she said, is a "good thing," but "there are some complications."

Mattey shared her remarks with FBA CEO Gary Bolton on an episode of Fiber for Breakfast on Wednesday (September 30), outlining the path ahead for this supplemental funding round for the $42 billion BEAD program (of which roughly $21 billion remains available). She also discussed some lingering open questions.

☕ Cold Brew

AI stopped answering this week and started acting. Meta's Muse became America's most downloaded app by doing chores for people, until Amazon shut it out of shopping. OpenAI answered with dots, agents that work while you sleep, one day after pulling its next model for misreporting what it had done. Anthropic took the top of the leaderboard, Nvidia's Windows chip heads to stores in October, and Starship finally reached orbit with real cargo.

Underneath it all runs a harder story: the labs are reviewing tens of thousands of cases where their own models went off-script, and they decide for themselves which ones you hear about.

📰 What happened last week in AI

There is a growing problem in construction recruiting, and the explosion of data center construction is exposing it.

Too many recruiters and HR professionals are evaluating construction professionals using hiring standards developed or traditional corporate careers.

They see multiple employers.

They see projects lasting six months, nine months or eighteen months.

They see someone leave one company and begin working for another shortly afterward.

And immediately the questions start:

Cities defend permit requirements, say ISPs aren't building networks fast enough.

Cities and counties around the US are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks.

The Federal Communications Commission has been taking public comments on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes to preempt state and local permitting rules. The FCC argues that too many local governments “excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible.”

The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety. Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks.

What If Automating AI R&D Triggers an Intelligence Explosion?

Anthropic and OpenAI are among the frontier AI companies actively working to automate AI R&D.

Anthropic, for example, created the Anthropic AI R&D Automation Index, and as of August 2026, it states that Claude ‘leads’ 26% of Anthropic’s AI R&D work and that the share of work at or above ‘AI collaborates’ is above 90%.

OpenAI recently announced that it has reached the goal of having an “automated research intern.” It now aims to create an automated AI researcher by March 2028.

It sounds interesting and even fascinating until we learn about the serious implications of what researchers call an “intelligence explosion” as a result of AI R&D automation.

The outcome of the Google ad-tech antitrust case shows that the need for a new agency is as pressing as ever.

This month, the multiyear Google ad-tech antitrust case reached the remedies stage with U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issuing her remedies order. The outcome, in many respects, echoes the struggles these large tech antitrust lawsuits have faced throughout the past three decades. Primarily, courts are limited in their capacity to effectively regulate these corporations solely through judicial rulings and piecemeal regulatory efforts. As a consequence, effective regulation of the tech industry continues to fall short.

Post Bulletin reports...

 Like most cities, Pine Island has a host of issues on its plate. Housing growth, property taxes, zoning, street repair and improvement.

All of it pales in comparison to the data center, a proposed project that would bring tech giant Google to town in a development known as Project Skyway.

With the election coming Nov. 3, three positions — two on the city council, one for mayor — are on the ballot, and how Pine Island residents vote could determine whether the much-debated data center continues to move forward or sees the brakes pumped.

Fresno, Kings, Madera, Merced and Tulare counties in California won $252.7M in federal BEAD funds; Tulare County gets $44M to connect 5,900 rural locations.

The grant will bring high-speed internet to rural communities that have gone without it for years. State representatives and local leaders announced the award Friday at the Visalia Convention Center, following the annual San Joaquin Valley Regional Association of California Counties conference, a three-day event where elected supervisors and regional leaders gather to tackle shared Central Valley issues.

The counties entered into an agreement last year to jointly apply for the money after initially pursuing funding separately, and California Public Utilities Commissioner Darcie Houck reported that more than $250 million was designated for the five county region.

It’s a chaotic time in an industry that’s reshaping our lives – Guardian reporters and experts recommend the books that help explain how we got here, and where we’re heading.

Have you been feeling trapped in an endless cycle of artificial intelligence hype and panic? You’re not alone.

It’s a chaotic time to make sense of the industry that’s reshaping our lives, whether or not we like it. Last week, another AI company employee publicly resigned, warning the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Despite these dire warnings, AI companies have seen “otherworldly” surges in revenue and driven the US stock markets to new highs as they continue to push AI tools into everything from public school classrooms to law enforcement agencies, as well as rushing to put up new datacenters across the country.

Thankfully, the Guardian’s tech reporters – and a few other tech experts we respect – are here to help. We’ve compiled an essential reading list of smart books that explain and critique the AI industry; books that, while flawed, illustrate key viewpoints in the AI debates; and a few books that provide deeper political and social context, including some works of speculative fiction.

Brazil's approach to platform regulation risks undermining Wikipedia and the knowledge commons, write João Alexandre Peschanski, Amalia Toledo and Elise Silva.

As Brazil approaches its presidential election on October 4, there are concerns about the impact that social media platforms' handling of election disinformation and other content moderation decisions might have on more than 150 million eligible voters. In August, Amnesty International submitted 15 ads to Facebook as an experiment to test Meta’s detection of election disinformation. Although 14 of them included disinformation, the platform approved eight. The organization reported that the seven ads were not rejected for disinformation, but because they appeared to concern an election or social issue and required identity verification.

Brazil is well aware of this problem, and has been at the forefront of platform liability reform. With an approach firmly based on digital sovereignty and constitutionality, Brazil has developed evolving mandates in areas like duty of care, child protections, and strict content removal timelines.

The world is watching with interest.

Developing common AI safety standards does not, by itself, undermine competition. Policymakers should not force companies to choose between competing vigorously and working together to prevent serious safety risks. Antitrust law should allow both.

Rightfiber has finalized its purchase of American Broadband Holding Company’s Nebraska assets, operating as Fastwyre Broadband.

The transaction’s financial details were not disclosed in Rightfiber’s Oct. 1 announcement.

The asset acquisition broadens Rightfiber’s regional network into 26 Nebraska communities, including Bellevue, Blair, Fremont, and Wayne.