The Justice Department is on the verge of settling a monopolization case against Live Nation, another win for MAGA lobbyists who worked urgently to get the ticketing and venue giant off the hook for its relentless intimidation tactics and distortion of market power.

Trump Antitrust chief Gail Slater was mostly a failure, though kept some antitrust cases alive. Despite attempts to mollify corporate lobbyists, Pam Bondi fired her anyway. What happens now?

Today, Attorney General Pam Bondi fired antitrust chief Gail Slater, who was considered a hawkish enforcer skeptical of big tech. Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, had come to dislike and distrust Slater, for a variety of reasons. She had ruffled feathers of corporate allies, been slow to achieve much, and had played her internal politics poorly.

But there’s another reason she was ousted. Corruption. For months now, Bondi and Blanche have been overruling Slater’s decisions, both big and small, often at the behest of a corporate lobbyist and MAGA influencer named Mike Davis, one of whose clients is Ticketmaster/Live Nation.

Web hosting company WP Engine has filed an amended complaint with brow-raising new allegations in its ongoing legal battle with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and his company Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company). The company now claims that Mullenweg intended to target 10 different hosting companies with royalty payments for their use of the WordPress trademark and tried to get payment processor Stripe to cancel its contract with WP Engine.

At the heart of the dispute, Mullenweg believes WP Engine is profiting from the open source WordPress project without contributing back to the community, and demanded the hosting company pay 8% of its monthly gross revenues as a royalty fee for using the WordPress brand.

A 1 GW orbital data center would cost roughly $42.4 billion — almost three times its ground-bound equivalent.

In a sense, this whole thing was inevitable. Elon Musk and his coterie have been talking about AI in space for years — mainly in the context of Iain Banks’ science-fiction series about a far-future universe where sentient spaceships roam and control the galaxy. 

Now Musk sees an opportunity to realize a version of this vision. His company SpaceX has requested regulatory permission to build solar-powered orbital data centers, distributed across as many as a million satellites, that could shift as much as 100 GW of compute power off the planet. He has reportedly suggested some of his AI satellites will be built on the moon.

“By far the cheapest place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less,” Musk said last week on a podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison. 

Mediacom Communications on Tuesday said it has finished upgrading broadband speeds for more than 92,000 homes and businesses in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, bringing multi-gig and symmetrical service options to the city.

The company, through an announcement provided to Broadband Communities, said the work builds on its existing fiber-rich network and was completed without new digging or cable burial, a move it says allowed for faster, less disruptive upgrades for customers.

Sens. Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal on Wednesday introduced the first bipartisan bill in Congress aimed at preventing data center power usage from spiking consumers’ electric bills.

The legislation, dubbed the “Guaranteeing Rate Insulation” or “GRID” Act, seeks to guarantee two things: no data-center related price increases for consumers’ utility bills, as well as ensuring first priority for grid access to everyday electric users. The bill also seeks to make new data center operators power their structures via off-grid sources, with a 10-year off-ramp for existing data centers.

The legislation would also mandate that data center operators publicly disclose current and future power usage.

It’s hard to fathom that we are just 266 days away from the 2026 midterm elections. But the efforts to distort, confuse and disenfranchise voters are well underway.

While President Trump is making dangerous and blatantly unconstitutional calls to “nationalize” elections, his Big Tech allies are doing their part to spread disinformation about voting. Unsurprisingly, Elon Musk is at the core of the problem. X users can prompt Musk’s AI tool, Grok, to confidently give “answers” that are wrong at the exact moment voters need basic, accurate information. We already saw the warning signs in 2024, when secretaries of state raised concerns about Grok spreading election misinformation.

2026 is looking even worse. Given that Grok — and now Grokipedia — is designed to present itself as an authoritative answer engine within the platform millions of people use every day, it’s important to understand not just what it says — but what it can produce when pushed.

Right now, Grok is in the news for becoming a child-porn generator. I can’t remember a bigger red flag, but it’s also a reminder of how easily this AI tool — and others like it — can be prompted to produce things it was never supposed to produce. All of this makes voting information harder to find and easier to distort as Grok — for lack of a more technical term — just makes shit up.

To better understand what this all looks like, I spoke with Raelyn Roberson, an independent researcher, journalist and election-protection organizer who tracks how misinformation spreads online — and what it does to voters when it lands at the worst possible moment.

Every year Congress rediscovers Section 230 and decides it’s the reason children are unsafe online. The frustration is real. Platforms have spent years designing products that predictably expose kids to harm. But the proposed solution is always the same: repeal or gut Section 230 and hope the internet becomes safer through liability alone.

That approach won’t work. Repealing Section 230 would not address the design-driven harms lawmakers are rightly worried about. Instead, it would destabilize the legal framework that allows platforms to moderate at all, while leaving the most dangerous platform design choices largely untouched.

Section 230 is often framed as a sweeping immunity that shields platforms from accountability. In reality, it does something much narrower. It prevents online services from being held liable as the publisher or speaker of user-generated content, while allowing them to remove or restrict that content without incurring liability for trying.

This is an important distinction, because dismantling Section 230 will not fix the problems lawmakers actually want to solve. Repeal Section 230, and platforms are forced into one of two bad choices.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 12, 2026 – The “Enhancing Administrative Reviews for Broadband Deployment Act” a bill aimed at removing barriers to deploying broadband on federal lands, cleared the House Natural Resources Committee by unanimous consent on Wednesday. 

Introduced by Rep. Tom Kean Jr., R-N.J., on December 11, 2025, the measure would require the Interior and Agriculture Departments to study and create a report on any barriers, rules or regulations–within their agencies–that are delaying broadband deployment. 

The FCC adopted new rules for voice providers that are part of the FCC’s effort to curtail robocalls. The new rules apply to every voice provider that sells a retail voice product to end-user customers, along with other categories of providers like voice wholesalers and international providers. The new rules were effective on February 5. 

The key new rules include the following:

DojoNetworks and regional fiber provider Gigapower said Wednesday they have struck a partnership to bring fiber-backed, bulk managed Wi-Fi to multifamily housing across Gigapower’s service areas.

The companies, in an announcement provided to Broadband Communities, said the arrangement will pair Gigapower’s fiber infrastructure with DojoNetworks’ managed Wi-Fi deployments to deliver building-wide connectivity for residents and common areas.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 11, 2026 – More than 1,300 people listened in, and just under 50 voiced opinions at, a Zoom webinar on how to spend the remaining $21 billion in funds under the government’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program.

They brought forth a wish list of funding items including permitting reform, digital literacy programs and emergency response improvements. A very small minority wanted to return the funds to the taxpayer, even though Congress has already allocated them. 

A technically grounded explanation of how the Philippine data communications grid actually functions, why its failures are predictable, and what engineering principles must be respected before any policy or funding solution can succeed.

In the decade before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. and Russia were engaged in high-stakes exchanges of advanced technology involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Skolkovo Innovation Center—a Russian government-backed technology hub that aimed to jump-start a “venture” innovation ecosystem in Moscow.

Jeffrey Epstein sat at the crossroads of academia, philanthropy, and venture finance as these global capital flows were threatened by the brewing confrontation in Ukraine.

In 2013, during the early cryptocurrency boom, Epstein sought an audience with Vladimir Putin to encourage the Russian president to shift course from the MIT–Skolkovo model. Instead of playing “catch up” with the United States through venture-backed startups, Epstein proposed, Russia could help lead a new financial system based on a novel global currency.

Epstein funded the early development of cryptocurrency through the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, founded in 2015.