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As America’s most decorated civil servants sipped cocktails in the presidential ballroom of the Capital Hilton, worrying about their table assignments and wondering where they fell in the pecking order between US senator and UAE ambassador, Elon Musk sat staring at his phone, laughing. Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI.
When the billionaire chief executive of AI chipmaker Nvidia threw a party in central London for Donald Trump’s state visit in September, the power imbalance between Silicon Valley and British politicians was vividly exposed. Jensen Huang hastened to the stage after meetings at Chequers and rallied his hundreds of guests to cheer on the power of AI. In front of a huge Nvidia logo, he urged the venture capitalists before him to herald “a new industrial revolution”, announced billions of pounds in AI investments and, like Willy Wonka handing out golden tickets, singled out some lucky recipients in the room. “If you want to get rich, this is where you want to be,” he declared. But his biggest party trick was a surprise guest waiting in the wings. At Huang’s cue, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, walked out as the crowd whooped at Huang’s pulling power.
The Village of Orland Park in Chicago's southwest suburbs has halted all construction permits for fiber-optic projects after a surge of complaints.
Conspiratorialism is downstream of the trauma of institutional failures. Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization. Monopolization is downstream of the failure to enforce antitrust law. Start with conspiratorialism and trauma. I am staunchly pro-vaccine. I have had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and can get impeccable 5g reception at the bottom of a coal-mine. Nevertheless. If you tell me that you are anti-vax because you: a) believe that the pharma companies are rapacious murderers who’d kill you for a nickel; and b) believe that their regulators are so captured that every FDA official should probably be wearing a gimpsuit; I’d be hard pressed to argue with you.
The Berrien County Broadband Project, an effort by the county and several partners to expand the availability of broadband internet in the community, is this year’s recipient of the Graham Woodhouse Intergovernmental Effort Award from the Southwest
The legal firewall is gone. A 2024 court ruling just made your AI a direct liability. In November, I exposed the AI Deregulation Gambit as a strategic liability. Recently, I detailed how this plays out in practice through AI-driven defamation and misattribution—where algorithms weaponize unverified narratives. Now, a 2024 legal ruling makes the liability from both scenarios legally enforceable. The “AI made me do it” defense is bankrupt. "The case was simple: A customer asked Air Canada’s chatbot about bereavement fares. The AI hallucinated, inventing a non-existent discount. The customer, relying on this information, bought a ticket. When Air Canada refused to honor the chatbot’s promise, the customer sued." The corporation deployed the standard playbook: Deny, Deflect, Delay. They argued the chatbot was a “separate legal entity” and that customers shouldn’t trust its information. The tribunal’s response was a watershed moment:
NEW YORK — Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to sign a landmark artificial intelligence bill establishing New York’s first guardrails for tech heavyweights to mitigate catastrophic risks. The deal comes after intense talks between the governor and sponsors Assemblymember Alex Bores and state Sen. Andrew Gounardes over the details. Hochul redlined much of the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act last week and replaced it with language largely matching a comparable California law, while the bill’s sponsors pressed to keep as much teeth in the legislation as possible. In its final iteration, the RAISE Act requires developers of the industry’s most advanced AI tools, called frontier models, to report critical safety incidents within 72 hours and imposes a $1 million penalty for the first violation and $3 million for subsequent ones. It creates an oversight office within the Department of Financial Services to assess frontier models.
It appears that NTIA missed an important step when it generated the new BEAD rules in June in the BEAD Restructuring Policy Notice. That is the document that changed the scoring of BEAD grants from using a dozen different scoring criteria to choose grant winners to a new method that focused on the character of…
With rumors swirling about a possible rescission on what NTIA is referring to as “savings,” of BEAD remaining (non-deployment) funds, U.S. Senator Roger Wicker (R – MS) introduced a bill today to rectify that. The SUCCESS for BEAD Act would ensure that states maintain remaining ‘non-deployment’ funds for each state’s individual use. SUCCESS is an acronym for Supporting U.S. Critical Connectivity and Economic Strategy and Security. The bill is co-sponsored by U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R - WV) and Environment and Public Works Chair. The House companion to this bill will be led by Rep. Andy Barr (R - KY). Why the excess funds in the first place?
Verizon is promising faster speeds and service-level agreements via a new '5G Network Slice – Enhances Internet' product targeted to enterprises.
Richard Shockey joins Chris Mitchell to explain how the collapse of the PSTN, weak federal oversight, and a messy transition to all-IP networks threaten everything from 911 reliability to rural connectivity.
The TikTok sale is officially happening, with a consortium of American investors set to take over U.S. operations of the video platform next month on Jan. 22, 2026. The deal means that TikTok, the fast-growing social video platform that upended the strategies of competitors like YouTube and Meta Platforms Inc., will have a new joint venture owner in the U.S.: TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX (Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm). Another 5 percent will be owned by other new investors, 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”
The FCC now serves political interests instead of the public, former agency officials said.
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Like their conventional counterparts, quantum computers can also break down. They can sometimes lose the atoms they manipulate to function, which can stop calculations dead in their tracks. But scientists at the US-based firm Atom Computing have demonstrated a solution that allows a quantum computer to repair itself while it's still running.
The artist’s hand refers to the evidence of an artist’s personal and unique touch left in a work. This can be seen in the specific brushstrokes of a painting, the modeling of a sculpture, or even the overall emotional quality of a piece. The proof left behind reveals or provides insight into the artist’s role in creating the art. But can the artist’s hand emerge in AI art? Aaron Hertzmann first mentioned the artist’s hand to me in a chat thread (see below). Hertzmann is a principal scientist at Adobe Research and he specializes in computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning. Hertzmann argues that computers do not make art; people do. He consistently rejects claims of machine creativity, emphasizing that art is a social phenomenon and that AI algorithms, despite their impressive capabilities, are tools used by human artists.
I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers — chairman of IBM’s board of directors — to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history. IBM could have made its own OS, of course. They were just afraid to, because they’d just narrowly squeaked out of a 12-year antitrust war with the Department of Justice (evocatively memorialized as “Antitrust’s Vietnam”): https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/02/the-true-genius-of-tech-leaders/ The US government traumatized IBM so badly that they turned over their crown jewels to these two prep-school kids, who scammed a pal out of his operating system for $50k and made billions from it. Despite owing his business to IBM (or perhaps because of this fact), Gates routinely mocked IBM as a lumbering dinosaur that was headed for history’s scrapheap. He was particularly scornful of IBM’s software development methodology, which, to be fair, was pretty terrible: IBM paid programmers by the line of code. Gates called this “the race to build the world’s heaviest airplane.”
Over the past year, major US tech companies have spent more than $350bn on AI-related infrastructure, with projections of over $400bn for 2026. This far exceeds the spending of any other nation — most notably China, where total investment is closer to an estimated $100bn. For many in the West, it may be reassuring that we have companies bold enough and capital markets deep enough to dominate a spending contest. If artificial intelligence is — as prophesied — the one ring to rule them all, then it would seem the west has the future in hand. That is the optimistic story. Yet there is another possibility: that Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI could mean winning the AI race but losing a broader contest for economic pre-eminence. That follows because the US has gone all-in on AI, while China is spreading its bets across several plausible futures. It all depends on the bet on AI being the right one. Despite all the talk of an existential AI race, China is somewhat less committed to AI than sometimes portrayed. Beijing regularly describes AI as a “national strategic priority” and has invested to avoid falling too far behind. But the state and its major companies are spending much more money to secure dominance in other domains, such as electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, solar panels, wind turbines and other forms of advanced manufacturing. These sectors may be less glamorous, but their returns are far less speculative.
It is the US that is truly infatuated with AI, with investments influenced by goals that are as mystical as they are commercial, especially the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence and “the singularity”. There is a strong belief in continued exponential progress — a rarity in the history of technology. The deeper one digs, the more otherworldly it becomes, among both AI proponents and doomsayers. The concentrated, monopolized nature of the US tech sector adds to the risk: with so much spending power in so few hands, the danger of groupthink grows.
What to do?
This morning the BEAD Progress Dashboard shows five more states final proposals approved. These approved states are Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Utah.
This means that to-date, 34 states & 3 territories have been NTIA approved and moved on to NIST. These final proposals account for ~2.29M locations. This leaves 16 states plus the District of Columbia yet to be approved. I know the NTIA and SBOs are burning the midnight oil (great 90s band, check them out) to get these approved by year’s end. Once again, the OG “fiber-first” BEAD is seeing fiber decline, now at ~64% of BSLs. LEO is at 22.18%. Pessimistically, if LEO doesn’t end up with ANY uptake, that leaves a digital divide of a half a million BSLs. That we know of so far.
As companies race to adopt AI, they’re sidelining the very people trained to spot red flags—and the consequences could be costly. In October, Lisa Talia Moretti, an academic who specializes in the ethical dilemmas created by emerging technologies, found that jobs in her field had fallen off a cliff. Based in the U.K., she had been helping conglomerates and medium-sized businesses understand how to adopt AI in a humane and profitable manner. Or, more succinctly, Moretti had been working as an AI ethicist—someone who, as she puts it, helps businesses understand “what this technology is and what it can do.” But as the AI arms race intensifies and tech giants lock into a battle to beat each other not only in creating the most sophisticated model but also in cornering the market, ethics is becoming an afterthought.
FCC Chairman Carr appeared before a Senate oversight committee and faced harsh criticism by Democrats on topics including threats against TV broadcasters.
I’ll start with an important caveat; the Minnesota BEAD Final Proposal has not yet been approved. Subsequently, the information based on that latest proposal is subject to change. The Office of Broadband Development (OBD) gave a nice overview of what’s happening with BEAD and more yesterday. It sounds as if approval is expected any day…
- The big carriers all saw their median FWA download speeds drop from Q1 to Q3 2025
- Ookla said it’s tough to determine how much of that decline is due to congestion versus signal degradation from foliage
- But the data still shows “strong performance that’s getting better,” said analyst Jeff Moore
Fixed wireless access (FWA) speeds for major operators declined across the board during the second and third quarters of 2025, according to a new Ookla report. But how much of that is seasonal or due to network congestion is tough to say.
“Digital Equity Unwrapped” – a special livestream bringing together advocates and broadband-for-all leaders who spent 2025 pushing for a more connected and inclusive nation – is slated for next Wednesday, December 17, beginning at 3 pm ET. Attendees will have screen-side seating for a virtual fireside chat with NDIA executive director Angela Siefer and American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB) executive director Gigi Sohn, two leaders who have shaped national conversations around broadband, digital inclusion, and local power.
According to Politico, Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker is introducing a bill today that would give states access to an estimated $20–$22 billion in remaining BEAD funds.
Politico states the bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito
WASHINGTON, Oct. 31, 2025 – Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty used a speech before the Media Institute on Wednesday to deliver a strong defense of First Amendment principles, even as she affirmed that federal law still grants the FCC authority to regulate broadcast content.
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