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Historical FCC precedent includes cases where station owners lost their broadcast licenses for deliberately skewing news coverage toward favored political candidates.
Ettienne Brandt, who most recently led Frontier's biz services unit, is the new CEO of Astound Broadband, which just struck a deal to combine with GFiber.
New Mexico's timely broadband subsidy program by StateScoop
Incumbents in the upper C-band are examining several options for vacating that spectrum, but there's no one-size-fits-all replacement.
Season 2 of the Master Plan podcast begins fifty years before today’s fears about a kinglike president.
The House of Representatives recently approved H.R. 5419, a bill introduced by Representative Tom Kean of New Jersey. Titled the Enhancing Administrative Reviews of Broadband Deployment Act, the bill would attempt to improve the process of getting permits for broadband on federal land. The bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and and Natural Resources. Specifically, the bill would direct the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture to conduct a comprehensive review of administrative barriers involved in reviewing applications to use federal rights-of-way.
Today, the MN House Workforce, Labor, and Economic Development Finance and Policy saw a presentation on AI (artificial intelligence) and Minnesota workforce from the University of Minnesota and about workforce concerns about AI from Northstar Policy Action. The questions from legislators were interesting and reflected issues that have come up in other committee meetings. So, if you have an interest in AI, this is a fairly quick way to learn about what’s happing in Minnesota or at least what’s happening enough to be discussed in policy circles.
A new lawsuit filed Monday joins two others centered around nonconsensual explicit images allegedly made by the AI chatbot. On Monday, three girls filed a class-action lawsuit against xAI alleging that the company’s Grok AI tool was used to generate child sexual abuse material from their photos. This new civil case joins at least two others revolving around nonconsensual deepfakes filed against xAI, which was founded by billionaire Elon Musk. Those earlier cases are centered around nonconsensual deepfakes posted on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk, while this new complaint involves a third-party app that relied on Grok AI to make images.
I work for a few ISPs that are lucky enough to be working in counties that are seeing explosive population and new housing growth. Growth has always been uneven across the country, and I decided to take a look at the parts of the country with the fastest growth. One of the best ways to understand housing growth is to look at permits to build new homes. Historically, 99% of permits to build new single-family homes results in a new home. About 80% of permits for multifamily homes turn into a condominium or apartment. According to the Census Bureau’s Building Permit Survey, the top five states for permits for single-family homes in 2025, as measured in permits per 100,000 residents, were South Carolina (56), North Carolina (48), Florida (45), Idaho (45), and Delaware (43). At the bottom of the list were New York (4), Connecticut (5), Illinois (6), Rhode Island (6), and Massachusetts (6).
Service assurance is officially graduating from an era of dashboards, tickets, and engineers scrambling to find what’s gone wrong to swift root cause analysis and proactive fixes
When Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it sought to foster innovation and competition in telecommunications markets, expand the definition of universal service, and modernize regulatory structures for the digital age. Three decades later, architects of the ‘96 Act say it achieved many of those goals, but numerous legal challenges following its passage reshaped how key provisions were implemented. “Litigation shaped so much of what the Act eventually became,” said Mignon Clyburn, a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, speaking Thursday among a panel of former FCC regulators, legal counsel, and policy advisors who helped shape and defend the landmark telecom law. Gathered for an event organized by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society marking the law’s 30th anniversary, the event reflected on both the spirit and letter of the landmark legislation which has shaped much of the modern Internet in the United States. The first major overhaul of telecommunications law in more than 60 years, the ‘96 Act required the FCC to conduct more than 80 separate rulemakings addressing everything from appropriate pricing, to interconnection rules and the unbundling of incumbent telephone networks.
In late 2024 the Biden FCC implemented a new rule requiring that broadband providers include a “nutrition label for broadband,” making any fees, restrictions, usage caps, or other limits clear at the point of sale. The proposal was mandated by Congress as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law to try and ensure the quality of taxpayer-subsidized broadband. The proposal was well-intentioned. It mandated a certain level of transparency on telecoms to ensure that consumers knew exactly what kind of broadband connection they were buying. The effort attempted to counter historically dodgy practices by bigger providers to jack up their advertised prices using sneaky and misleading below-the-line fees. But four years after Congress proposed the idea, studies began making it clear that ISPs weren’t seriously adhering to the rules, and regulators weren’t really interested in enforcing them anyway.
Daniela Amodei, who cofounded Anthropic with her brother Dario, said uniquely human qualities will actually be more critical in the age of AI, not less. In an interview with ABC News that aired on Saturday, she said the number of jobs that AI could do without help from people is “vanishingly small.” At the same time, even the most cognitively challenging tasks that humans excel at can also be augmented by AI. “I continue to believe that humans plus AI together actually create more meaningful work, more challenging work, more interesting work, high-productivity jobs,” Amodei added. “And then I think it will also open the aperture to a lot of access and opportunity for many people.”
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Something is broken in how communities get the information they need to function, and a new statewide report puts data behind what many of us already know from experience. The Michigan Media Ecosystem Report, published in November 2025 by The Pivot Fund, spent months talking with Michigan residents about how they find, trust, and use local news and information. The findings are striking: people are consuming news constantly, yet most don’t feel well-informed about what’s happening in their own communities. They’re cobbling together information from Facebook groups, word of mouth, Google searches, and direct calls to city hall, not because they don’t care, but because the systems that were supposed to keep them informed have contracted, consolidated, or disappeared entirely. This isn’t just a media industry problem. It’s a civic problem.
The federal government could require PA to change its prevailing wage law before releasing millions in broadband funds
In January 2026, the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that the Lifeline program—which provides small subsidies for telecommunications services provided to low-income households—has been systematically exploited through fraudulent enrollments of deceased individuals and duplicate subscriber claims. The OIG concluded the problem is concentrated in three "opt-out" states (California, Texas, and Oregon), which the FCC permitted to run their own subscriber eligibility verification systems instead of using the Universal Service Administrative Company's (USAC) federal National Verifier and National Lifeline Accountability Database (NLAD).1 Because these state systems bypass USAC's death checks at the enrollment stage,2 they created a significant gap that bad actors—primarily providers and their sales agents—have exploited. The core vulnerability is structural: the opt-out exemption allowed California, Texas, and Oregon to bypass federal safeguards that successfully blocked over 1.3 million fraudulent enrollment attempts in other states between 2018 and 2024. The FCC has already revoked California's opt-out status, and the OIG's recommendations largely aim to close the remaining structural gaps before similar fraud scales further. Providers and their agents—not random external fraudsters, and, importantly, not Lifeline recipients—are identified as the primary perpetrators.
As telecom companies and billionaires consolidate control over media outlets and platforms, what does that mean for journalism and democracy? Chris and Karl Bode unpack the long arc of media consolidation, the decline of local news, and why rebuilding informed communities may require both policy reform and stronger local connections.
Broadband ISPs should be held to a higher public interest standard and regulated like traditional utilities in California, a new joint study by nonprofit state policy news outlet Cal Matters and UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab argues. State governments should also vocally support community broadband networks as a direct challenge to monopoly power, the authors state.
The Buzz - ■
Mistral launched Mistral Forge at Nvidia GTC, enabling enterprises to train custom AI models from scratch on proprietary data - ■
The platform differentiates from OpenAI and Anthropic, which primarily offer fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches - ■
Mistral's bet targets enterprises demanding full model ownership and deep customization beyond surface-level adjustments - ■
The launch signals intensifying competition in the lucrative enterprise AI market, where customization could be the key differentiator French AI startup Mistral is making a bold bet on enterprise customization with Mistral Forge, a new platform that lets companies train AI models from the ground up using their own data. Announced at Nvidia's GTC conference, the move puts Mistral on a collision course with OpenAI and Anthropic, who've largely focused on fine-tuning pre-trained models. It's a strategic gamble that enterprise clients actually want to build, not just tweak, and it could reshape how companies think about AI ownership. Mistral just threw down a major challenge to the AI establishment.
Arizona's attorney general filed criminal charges against Kalshi on Tuesday in a dramatic escalation of the legal battle over prediction markets. Why it matters: Kalshi allows users in all 50 states to risk money on event contracts — including what it calls "100% legal sports trading" — but detractors say it usurps state gambling regulations. Driving the news: Arizona AG Kris Mayes, a Democrat, hit Kalshi with 20 counts, including charges for operating an illegal gambling business and providing election wagering.
Two weeks into its senseless, unlawful, unpopular and grossly mismanaged war on Iran, the Trump administration has locked in on a familiar target: the media. President Trump and his cabinet are failing, flailing and saying the quietest parts at max volume. Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr have lashed out at critical coverage with bogus charges of “fake news,” “hoaxes” and even “TREASON” in a desperate attempt to cover up their blunders by blaming the messengers. They hope they can silence critics and dodge hard questions by appealing to their billionaire bosses and threatening those who aren’t yet on board with blocked mergers, revoked broadcast licenses and canceled government contracts. Will this finally be the moment that media execs stand up to censorship and politicians wake up to the dangers of media coercion and consolidation? We desperately need them to stop capitulating and start pushing back.
The advocacy group leaders highlighted major settlements and accomplishments as reasons for expanding budget.
“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions...have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” the FCC Chair posted on X
Amagi has published its latest report into regional FAST viewership alongside a special survey looking at AI in Media Operations. Asked to evaluate 20 end-to-end content operations tasks, respondents across broadcast and streaming identified information-driven workflows such as metadata enrichment, context tagging, subtitling and translation. Srinivasan KA, co-founder and president, global business, Amagi, commented, “The industry is entering a phase where AI is no longer just about experimentation — it’s about embedding intelligence directly into operational workflows. Media companies that integrate applied AI across ingest, localisation, scheduling, and monetisation will unlock meaningful gains in speed, efficiency, and scalability.”
- The Trump Administration’s insistence on low-cost BEAD proposals has left a $21 billion slush fund of leftover BEAD monies
- The NTIA is currently trying to decide what to do with these non-deployment funds
- Meanwhile, an industry consultant predicts there will be defaults in the BEAD program
Many stakeholders in the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program are too polite to call the program a “dud.” But they’re starting to question whether BEAD — since the Trump administration changed the rules in mid-2025 — is going to make a real difference in closing the digital divide. There are concerns about the large amount of BEAD funds that are leftover. People are also questioning whether satellite will provide enough bandwidth over time. And at least one industry consultant predicts there will be defaults in the BEAD program. First, there’s concern that only about half of the $42.5 billion that was allocated for BEAD is going toward connecting households. The remaining non-deployment funds are still in limbo-land.
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![[Updated] Carr Threatens Broadcast Licenses Over Iran War Coverage | by George Winslow | TVTechnology.com | Surfing the Broadband Bit Stream | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/OV12WhGO_m6t_N7H4kqu4Tl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
