WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 15, 2026) – The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition, issued the following statement on today’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Consumers’ Research v. FCC.

“We are disappointed by today’s decision. Last year, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Universal Service Fund, and today’s ruling does not change that. Today’s decision only addresses issues surrounding USAC authority,” said Joey Wender, Executive Director of the SHLB Coalition.

“SHLB is reviewing the decision with our legal counsel and will work with the FCC and other stakeholders to determine how best to respond to this decision to ensure the Universal Service Fund can continue its important work.”

David Ellison’s freshly formed Skydance Corp. is off to a rocky start on Wall Street.

He won Warner Bros. Discovery after a yearlong battle. But investors, at this point, appear to believe he wildly overpaid for the deal — that the newly merged company, dubbed Skydance Corp., is worth nowhere near the $78 billion in cash Paramount shelled out for WBD.

As of Oct. 5, the last day of trading for WBD and Paramount Skydance (PSKY) on Nasdaq, Warner Bros. Discovery had a market capitalization of $77.7 billion and Paramount was around $11 billion. Today, Skydance has a market cap of under $40 billion — less than half the predecessor companies’ combined value.

Amid what she called a "mass surveillance crisis," US Rep. Rashida Tlaib announced legislation on Wednesday to ban the use of federal funds for powerful dragnet spying systems—including the automated license plate-reading cameras manufactured by Flock Safety.

Amid escalating concerns about artificial intelligence from within and beyond the industry and related demands for policymakers worldwide to swiftly enact strong safeguards, attorneys general from eight US states sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Wednesday.

“OpenAI designed a product to attract young users and keep them engaged for as long as possible so it could capture their extensive personal data for the company’s commercial benefit,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes in a statement.

The public "has suffered irreparable harm—including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse," says one of the eight lawsuits.

Every day, we are told that we live in the future — or at least, on its precipice. “The Intelligence Age” is just a few years away, just as Marvin Minsky told us it was a few years away in 1970. Technology will solve every problem, as long as we are ‘optimistic’. But if you prefer to be pessimistic, there is also a flavor of hype for that, too — promoted by the same narrow slice of tech elites and upholding the same fantasy that technology moves in a straight, unstoppable line toward an apocalyptic Singularity.

When we pause and lean back from the screen, however, our lived present is made up of the ruins of past futures, our legs constantly kicking against the expensive debris of earlier fantasies. A South Korean journalist wanders alone through the abandoned ruins of virtual university campuses on the Metaverse, many of them operating at a ratio of seven-digit figures in development costs to three-digit figures in daily users.

An American woman has partial vision restored with a smart bionic implant technology, then is suddenly rendered blind again when the company that developed it goes bankrupt. AI companies loudly lobby for state subsidies on data centers, then quietly withdraw when the time comes to deliver concrete infrastructure, jobs, and technological progress, despite their continued ability to funnel astronomical levels of funding to each other through “circular financing.” Chinese data centers lie fallow and underused after anticipatory investment, while grid overload concerns have stalled Kenya’s headline data center project.

Officials broke ground in Elmer, NJ on a $132.5 million fiber project bringing 500+ miles of broadband to Cumberland and Salem counties.

The South Jersey Middle Mile Broadband Project has a total cost of $34,538,131.62, with $24,176,692.13 covered by federal funding, officials said.

BOULDER CITY, Nev. (AP) — Janelle Sorenson loves the clear night skies in Boulder City, less than an hour's drive from the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip. It's a small, quiet town, and she thinks an artificial intelligence data center would ruin the community and scar the desert landscape.

So over the summer, she joined with other residents to successfully oppose plans for one of the giant computing warehouses that have popped up around the country.

But their victory was short-lived. The developers withdrew their application and instead sought adjacent land owned by the federal government — and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management signed off.

The data center issue has dominated the competitive governor’s race in Nevada, where 80% of the land is owned by the federal government.

The rules that built Silicon Valley weren’t written to build Silicon Valley. The Pentagon wanted a guidance computer, a federal judge wanted to settle a case against a telephone monopoly, and a California legislature in 1872 had farmers and railroads in mind.

Together they produced the conditions for an industry, and this is the account of how, running from the land grant the railroad magnate, Leland Stanford, signed in 1885 to the two governments that now write the rules for the companies training frontier models.

Silicon Valley, a metonym for the behemoth technology industry of the San Francisco Bay Area, is usually explained by its people: the garages, the dropouts, and the founders. What does not get mentioned are the statutes, the court rulings, and the agencies that first created it. They did not invent anything, but set the conditions. Innovation and investment has compounded ever since, wave after wave, from missile guidance to the Internet to the AI boom. The most recent of them, artificial intelligence, took in $211 billion of venture capital in 2025, about three-fifths of every venture dollar invested worldwide.

Years ago, I spent a good part of my time working on a multi-carrier effort to build interoperable APIs. It wasn't formally a joint venture. Call it a pre-JV. But it had all the ingredients: operators who competed fiercely every day, trying to build something together because none of them could do it alone.

Here's what nobody tells you about these efforts: the technology is the easy part.

Most of my job happened on the phone. I called member companies to make sure they'd show up to the next meeting. I negotiated what would go on the agenda and, just as often, what wouldn't. Almost every conversation seemed to involve three lawyers, so even straightforward decisions took the long way around.

Trust was the constant challenge. These companies spent their days trying to win each other's customers. Asking them to speak candidly in the same room was asking a lot.

Powerful AI models continue to cause chaos, but their targets aren’t widely seeking justice. Instead, they’re being encouraged to adopt those same tools.

When Philadelphia police criticized Anthropic last week for submitting a false tip about an unsolved murder, I thought it might become one of the first cases where an AI company faced legal consequences for misconduct by their agents.

The incident occurred on July 18, when Anthropic said it was testing its Claude Haiku 4.5 model’s ability to perform “example tasks on randomly selected webpages.” The model was instructed not to “submit anything destructive,” and yet, Claude filed a tip to police looking for information about an ongoing murder investigation. “I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area … during that time period,” Claude wrote. The submission, which didn’t include a name or contact information, landed in a spam folder, and officers didn’t review it until Anthropic discovered the gaffe on September 28 and notified the department October 7.

Knowingly providing fictitious information about a crime to police is a misdemeanor in Pennsylvania, but so far, authorities have not pressed charges against Anthropic, and it's unclear if they ever will. Solomon Leach, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia district attorney, says the office “does not comment on whether something is being actively investigated.”

Amazon is disappointed in Oregon, which, depending on the circumstances, can be a reasonably encouraging start to the day.

In a letter dated October 9 and reported by OPB this week, Governor Tina Kotek asked the Department of Environmental Quality to pause processing and issuing air and water discharge permits for new or expanding data centers until July 1, 2027. The directive also covers municipal wastewater permit changes intended to accommodate those facilities.

That gives the state a substantial brake on development beyond its earlier pause involving state-owned land. As OPB explains, most large data centers need those permits whether they are building on public or private property. The cloud, it turns out, has an address, and the neighbors would like a word.

Token prices keep falling and AI bills keep rising, and most of that money lands with two vendors. The fix isn't to spend less on AI. It's to stop renting all of it.

// Executive Summary

The story most companies tell themselves about AI costs is that the market will fix them. Token prices have collapsed, so the bill should shrink on its own. That isn't what's happening. Usage is growing faster than prices fall, and the money is concentrating with a handful of frontier labs and the chip and cloud vendors behind them. Meanwhile, open models have closed most of the capability gap, and the hardware to run them now sits on a desk. The question for 2027 isn't how much to spend on AI. It's how much of your intelligence you want to rent.

Amazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy has fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with opposition leading to hundreds of proposed and enacted moratoriums from New York to San Francisco.

Meanwhile, a wave of startups is betting that consumers will hand AI agents access to their inboxes, files, and credit cards — if they can get websites to let them in. 

There is no shortage of artificial intelligence frameworks this year. In March, the White House sent Congress its National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, a set of legislative recommendations built around accelerating deployment and preempting state AI laws. Leading AI companies, think tanks, industry groups, and civil society organizations have released frameworks, platforms, or blueprints of their own. Today Public Knowledge is adding ours: the Public Knowledge AI Regulation Framework.

At a time when what seems most urgent is unifying society and policymakers around a set of specific and actionable policy proposals, why introduce yet another set of ideas into the mix?

No one is standing up for both open technology and protecting the public.

WASHINGTON — On Tuesday evening, the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., extended an earlier restraining order against the Trump administration’s efforts to bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters from the White House. The news outlets are suing the White House on the grounds that such a ban violates their constitutional rights. 

In his decision, Judge Timothy Kelly — a Trump appointee — wrote that the court believed that the news organizations “were likely to succeed on their claims that their hard passes were revoked without due process required under the Fifth Amendment.” The court also held that the ban violates the plaintiffs’ First Amendment protections for freedom of speech and of the press. 

In late September, Free Press joined nearly 80 press-freedom groups and news organizations in filing an amicus brief in support of CNN, MS NOW and Politico.

Nora Benavidez, Free Press’ senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights, said:

I was recently reading some older regulations related to copper, and this reminded me how regulation was used for many years to shape competition, or to be more precise, regulation was used to protect monopoly providers from competition. It got me to ask the question if regulation is still doing the same thing. 

Telephone and related services were heavily regulated since the early days.

The International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday that the global economy faces serious risks from Big Tech firms taking on massive debt to fund the buildout of artificial intelligence data centers worldwide. Could this lead to a new financial crisis?

The IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report outlines a number of risks to economic growth in the coming years, including a reliance on AI industry spending that it warns could lead to a new financial crisis.

E-Rate provides approximately $4 billion annually to help schools and libraries afford essential broadband connectivity. This economic impact study provides an estimate on how eliminating this support—effectively imposing a “connectivity tax” on educational institutions—would affect investment, GDP, employment, labor income, and economic output, including the ripple effects across the broader economy.