The AI boom has caused as much carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere in 2025 as emitted by the whole of New York City, it has been claimed.

The global environmental impact of the rapidly spreading technology has been estimated in research published on Wednesday, which also found that AI-related water use now exceeds the entirety of global bottled-water demand.

The figures have been compiled by the Dutch academic Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a company that researches the unintended consequences of digital trends. He claimed they were the first attempt to measure the specific effect of artificial intelligence rather than datacentres in general as the use of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini soared in 2025.

The figures show the estimated greenhouse gas emissions from AI use are also now equivalent to more than 8% of global aviation emissions. His study used technology companies’ own reporting and he called for stricter requirements for them to be more transparent about their climate impact.

“One of the most ‘democratic’ republics in the world is the United States of America, yet nowhere is the power of capital, the power of a handful of multimillionaires over the whole of society, so crude and so openly corrupt as in America. Once capital exists, it dominates the whole of society.” – V.I. Lenin, 1919

Last November, four days after the presidential election, Fox News personality Jimmy Failla said Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris because he had a “secret weapon.” That weapon? The working class, at least according to Failla.

In this commentator’s telling, Trump “connected with working-class voters on unprecedented levels…at a time when far too many people feel ignored by Washington elites.”

The same narrative was being pushed again on Inauguration Day, with split-screen coverage on right-wing social media contrasting Democratic Party lawmakers in their stuffy-looking suits on one side and everyday Americans in their Carhartt hoodies and blue jeans on the other, eating hot dogs and popcorn as they awaited Trump’s arrival at Capital One Arena.

The message was clear: Trump fights the “political establishment” to lift up the masses, those who work for a living and struggle to get by.

If we’re being honest, we must admit that Failla, Fox News, and the rest of the far-right echo chamber aren’t telling a complete lie. There’s no denying Trump managed to lock in the support of a substantial number of working-class Americans (mostly but by no means exclusively white ones)—otherwise, there’s no way he could have scored 77 million votes.

But to argue that Trump is the workers’ champion, that he’s a warrior battling the powerful and wealthy on behalf of the rest of us? That’s where the story completely falls apart.

When I first entered the industry in the 70s, Bell Labs held an exalted place in the industry that was responsible for inventing and perfecting the technologies we all used. Bell Labs was founded and owned by the giant AT&T monopoly, and was operated with the brilliant concept of hiring the smartest people and letting…

Ever since a spate of mergers in the 1990s, Westlaw and LexisNexis have dominated legal research. And that might be why searching legal cases is so costly, even in the age of AI.

The past year has seen a steady drip of news related to quantum, with telcos increasingly thinking about improving the security of their networks.

The passing year certainly did its best to live up to its designation by the UN as the international year of quantum science and technology, at least in the world of telecom. Even if commercial quantum computers are still years away, the industry is already grappling with what their arrival will bring.

A big concern is shoring up defenses against quantum computing's expected implications for cybersecurity. The technology is broadly expected to crack common encryption algorithms, which are underpinned by mathematical equations that are for all practical purposes impenetrable for classical computers but vulnerable to quantum ones.

The Trump administration brought the sledgehammer down on clean energy — but that still wasn't enough to crush it.

For the past few years, Light Reading has been exploring the digital divide in our podcast, The Divide, where we talk to guests about why and where digital inequity still exists, and what's being done to get high-speed Internet to everyone, everywhere.

While broadband providers and trade associations in the US continue to celebrate the ongoing deployment of broadband infrastructure across the country – and while those builds are indeed in progress (as you'll note if you read our weekly column, The Buildout) – the fact remains that the digital divide persists. That divide comprises three distinct issues: broadband access, affordability and adoption.

It was a year of tough questions about how to stop the AI boom from spiking household electricity bills and derailing the clean energy transition.

Last week I posted the annual MN County Broadband Profiles. They are an opportunity for folks to see what’s happening in their community, what they can expect in terms of broadband and where they might need help. Someone asked me about how they could best use them. So, I came up with some ideas to…

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17, 2025 – An inquiry into how to accelerate wireline broadband deployments from the Federal Communications Commission has drawn sharply diverging responses from cities, electric cooperatives, and broadband industry groups.

Cities like Austin, Texas, have blasted the effort as “a solution in search of a problem".

The Trump scandals can be overwhelming, but as I argue in this piece, his corruption is enabled by media consolidation. We tend to think of antitrust and corruption in separate buckets, but the Jimmy Kimmel scandal shows how concentrated control over information becomes the ground on which corruption thrives.

It’s time to break up Big Media, Big Tech, and the Big Money finance system that binds them together.

The real threat to liberal democracy isn’t authoritarianism—it’s nationalist oligarchy. Here’s how American foreign policy should change.

By treating IT and AI as neutral tools, we obscure our ability to see—and resist—power. If just one of the big three tech giants collapses, societal mayhem could follow.

A bill filed late last month would claw back $21 billion allocated to state governments to address the digital divide, marking another moment in the debate over expanding broadband internet access in rural America. 

A draft version of the bill, sponsored by Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, would limit the scope of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. BEAD, created as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act under the Biden administration, is a $42.45 billion federal grant program aimed at connecting every American to high-speed internet. 

Of that $42.45 billion, about $21 billion is slotted for so-called nondeployment funds — essentially, anything other than infrastructure to expand internet access. Those other projects could include funding for permitting, telehealth, cybersecurity, preparedness for artificial intelligence, and more. 

Ernst’s bill would claw back those nondeployment dollars, angering critics and lawmakers across multiple states. 

2025 was a transformative year for the submarine cable industry, characterized by unprecedented private investment and AI-driven infrastructure demands.

The world's largest hyperscalers remain the largest investors in new submarine cable systems in 2025 as they race to ensure they have the essential infrastructure in place to support their growing networks of data centers and cloud regions.

Google Cloud announced in late November its plan to construct TalayLink, a new subsea cable connecting Australia and Thailand. The cable will create a new, diverse route to Thailand via the Indian Ocean, west of the Sunda Strait. Many existing subsea cables currently pass through this area. Google Cloud also announced plans for new connectivity hubs in Mandurah, Western Australia, and southern Thailand. 

Light Reading's D2D market coverage this year spotlights progression from testing to launches, and competitive dynamics among global satellite partners.

Direct-to-device satellite connectivity shifted from promise to product in 2025, as T-Mobile launched the first commercial D2D messaging service in the US and operators worldwide scrambled to match the capability that suddenly went from a luxury to a critical competitive advantage.

The FCC reports on Chairman Brendan Carr summary of the FCC’s key wins in 2025... “2025 was a historic year for the FCC and I am proud of all the wins we were able to achieve for the American people,” Chairman Carr stated.  “I want to express my thanks and appreciation to the agency’s talented staff for the great and efficient results that they delivered all year long.  But this is just the beginning.  The FCC is firing on all cylinders, and we will build on this momentum to deliver even more wins in 2026.”

MinneapoliMedia is a new media source in Coon Rapids MN. It features local folks and tells their stories. A recent article caught my eye because it started with an image that will be familiar to many readers and it’s a story that folks who have good broadband think is in the past, a farmer without adequate broadband…

"Naima Dhore apologizes for the delay. She is in rural Minnesota, where broadband thins the farther you move from city limits, where the land opens wide but infrastructure does not always follow. She explains that she needs to stay still so the connection does not drop.

It is an unintentional metaphor for the work itself."

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23, 2025 – Major broadband industry groups are continuing their push for the Federal Communications Commission to preempt state and local permitting rules for wireline infrastructure deployments.