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Ensuring universal access to voice, internet, and emergency communications services should be something that requires no debate. It is a bedrock concept that Congress has locked into the law for a century as broadband has become the primary conduit to access local, state, and federal government services, setup a doctor’s appointment, pay your taxes, and interact with your school system, just to name a few examples. Making sure every citizen has access to the information economy is a fundamental concept that Congress has locked into law.
Last year WPLG in Miami dropped its long-time ABC affiliation and became a full independent, causing shockwaves through the industry. WPLG was tired of paying what it considered outrageous affiliation fees to ABC. With Berkshire Hathaway’s deep pockets and a growing top 20 market, WPLG could afford to take the significant risk of going it alone. Since that change, WPLG President and CEO Bert Medina has led significant local news expansion and hired enough employees to do it right. In a recent interview, Medina didn’t talk about ratings or revenue but did indicate the station’s plan was on track.
Nvidia has a plan to make sure its GPUs won't lose value. It wants to convince a new crop of financiers to keep lending for AI buildouts. Nvidia announced this week that Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR were willing to commit up to $500 billion to build AI data centers. That eye-popping figure got a lot of the attention, but the bigger story is Nvidia’s effort to create a secondary market for aging GPUs. To convince those big-name financial companies, Nvidia has agreed to guarantee, with its own money, that its chips used as collateral in these deals will retain their value.
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley pushed back against claims that the company's expanding network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) is contributing to a surveillance state, telling Newsweek that transparency and accountability are central to the company's approach as it unveils new privacy protocols this week amid widespread backlash and protests. The technology executive told Newsweek in a Tuesday video interview that Flock's "end goal isn’t a dystopian future of surveillance; it’s one where we all feel safe."
The new order sweeps away decades of existing U.S. cybersecurity policy prohibiting private companies from conducting 'hack back' attacks or offensive cyber operations.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals made a recent ruling that could end up eliminating one of the biggest rights-of-way issues that slow down fiber construction projects. In the case of CSX Transportation v. Zayo Group, LLC, the court ruled that the easement that CSX owns for its railroad tracks only applies to the surface of the Earth and that the railroad right-of-way does not extend either above or below the tracks.
Telecom leaders increasingly cite AI as reason to advance fiber-friendly policies, while analysts are also watching Starlink's 'fiber-like reliability.' As the business world pursues its fixation with putting AI everywhere, telecom industry professionals continue to emphasize the role fiber networks are playing in supporting that evolution. They're also using it as a point of distinction, as competition for funding and customers creeps further in from low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite and fixed wireless access (FWA) providers. "America's AI future and the future of our entire innovation economy runs through fiber broadband networks. Not alongside them. Not around them. Through them," USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing on Intelligent Networks in July.
Big Tech Says These Bills Will Break the Internet. Ask Them Under Oath. - a contribution to The Capitol Forum's Op-Ed Newsletter Series. Imagine a world without two-day shipping from Amazon. Or one where Google Maps doesn’t work and the Apple App Store is overrun with malware. You shouldn’t have to. These far-fetched scenarios wouldn’t normally be taken seriously in a policy debate about competition legislation.
But one of the perks of Big Tech’s limitless coffers is the resources to spread prophecies of doom anytime those coffers are threatened. And we are seeing that dynamic, yet again, with tech antitrust bills before Congress. Recently, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) reintroduced the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which would bar the largest players, like Amazon, Google, and Apple, from unfairly favoring their own services and stifling competition on their platforms. It follows the reintroduction of the Open App Markets Act (OAMA), which would enable competitive app stores and allow developers to use their own billing systems. These bills should be noncontroversial. In a landmark investigation years ago, Congress found dominant platforms harmed consumer choice, innovation, entrepreneurship, and digital privacy. Federal antitrust enforcers have active suits against Apple and Amazon for monopolization and won two cases against Google. Global enforcers across continents have reached similar conclusions. The evidence is overwhelming, and Congress responding to the facts should hardly be cause for alarm. But any member of Congress weighing these bills will face an onslaught from tech interests warning that voting yes means breaking Amazon Basics, disabling Apple’s Find My iPhone tool, or stopping Google Maps from appearing in Google search results. It’s a familiar playbook.
What comes next has to be structural, not just reactive, writes Courtney C. Radsch. In a landmark ruling last Thursday, a New Mexico judge not only ordered Meta to pay an additional fine of more than half a billion dollars in a case about teen mental health and child exploitation but also imposed a slew of safety measures aimed at mitigating harmful design features that could have repercussions for child safety everywhere. The fine—in what appears to be the first case in which a platform has been determined to be a “public nuisance”—will not go to the state's coffers, but to therapists, screening, and treatment for the teenagers New Mexico says Instagram already hurt. Courts tend to write remedies like that when they've decided the harm wasn't an accident but rather part of a company’s business plan.
Looks like an entire orbital launchpad could be hitched to a semi-truck and driven anywhere on Earth, thanks to space launch provider Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab has unveiled GHOST, which is short for Global Hypersonic and Orbital Spaceport Technology, a portable platform. GHOST is a deployable, containerized launch infrastructure designed to fire rockets into orbit or suborbital trajectories from nearly anywhere on Earth.
On a dusky evening in February 2026, with snow set on the grounds outside of the New Jersey city council building in New Brunswick, a shaking camera follows Ben Dziobek, a political and environmental organiser, running towards a packed crowd shouting “They cancelled it”. A distant voice is heard asking “They what?” to which Dziobek then repeats “They cancelled it”. The crowd then erupts into celebratory cries and chants led by Dziobek reciting: “The people united will never be defeated”. In the background, the sound of police sirens surrounds the group, but undeterred Dziobek goes on to give a speech in which he declares victory. “This is what it looks like when people stand up” he says as he promises the crowd that the community organisers will go on fighting against data centers across New Jersey. Using emotive language, chants are then directed towards Big Tech and private equity firms as the camera swings across people holding up signs including one that says, “AI out of New Brunswick”. Meanwhile, organisers hand out leaflets, presumably for the next gathering.
LOS ANGELES, CA — The Los Angeles County Internal Services Department (ISD) and WeLink Communications (WeLink) announced today that construction of the County's first Community Broadband Networks (CBN) is nearing completion, with new affordable, high-speed internet service now available to residents and small businesses in select communities across East Los Angeles and South Los Angeles. The new internet service is offered by WeLink in partnership with Los Angeles County. WeLink provides a low-cost home internet plan starting at $25 per month for qualifying households and market-rate plans starting at $65 per month. All plans feature fixed monthly pricing with no promotional rates through at least September 2027, unlimited data, necessary equipment, no credit checks or cash deposits, and multilingual customer support. Interested residents and small businesses in the service areas can contact WeLink at WeLink.com/LACounty or by calling (844) 285-9434. Service is becoming available across all or portions of the following communities in unincorporated Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles:
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Anthropic researchers found AI agents can clash, collude, and coordinate in unexpected ways, raising new questions about whether today’s safety tests capture the risks of multi-agent systems.
Yesterday, TechFreedom filed an opposition to petitions to deny renewal of ABC’s broadcast licenses. Some petitions explicitly ask the FCC to punish ABC for its speech in the name of “balance” or “fairness,” echoing threats from FCC Chair Brendan Carr and President Donald. Other petitions ask the FCC to deprive ABC of its licenses because of an alleged violation of the FCC’s employment non-discrimination rules. TechFreedom explains why the Constitution and the Communications Act bars both, and why the law and longstanding FCC practice do not allow the FCC to conduct this proceeding, or to terminate ABC’s licenses early without respecting key safeguards.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records related to the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to require eight ABC-owned television stations to renew their broadcast licenses early.
The Texas Broadband Development Office placed a temporary hold Tuesday on all disbursements of billions of dollars in federal funds related to the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, or BEAD. The hold comes after the office was accused of favoritism to certain companies, specifically Elon Musk’s Starlink, which led to lawmakers announcing an audit. In an email obtained by The Texas Tribune, the state broadband office shared with subgrantees that the hold was effective as of Monday, and will be in place “until further notice.” The office did not give a reason as to why the disbursements were paused.
Despite being under legal scrutiny, Amazon’s monopoly and its abuse of sellers and shoppers are only getting worse. Its dominance is structural and self-reinforcing, and behavioral restrictions alone are unlikely to restore competition. Three years ago, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 17 state Attorneys General sued Amazon, alleging that the company’s monopoly power eliminated competition and harmed sellers and consumers. It’s no exaggeration to say that the outcome of this case will determine the future of commerce in the United States. It will decide whether online markets remain dominated by a single gatekeeper or become open, competitive arenas in which independent businesses can innovate and thrive.
The combination of an electricity affordability crisis and the massive energy demands of data centers might be the right time to consider structural reforms. For this episode of the Local Energy Rules Podcast, host John Farrell is joined by Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
David Ellison is making a lot of promises. History shows promises made when trying to merge are meaningless. So don’t try negotiating a better Paramount-Warner merger, just oppose it. Right now, Paramount CEO David Ellison is encouraging Hollywood to embrace his acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. His team is offering promises, such as a guarantee of making 30 films a year plus a 45-day theatrical window and licensing concessions, to allay fears that the merger will lead to job loss, reduced content output and less competition across the industry. But these promises are a Trojan horse that rarely leads to meaningful actions, and comes with few guarantees, as we’ve seen in merger after merger. The process is like clockwork: when big companies acquire their rivals, they often encounter a skeptical industry and antitrust enforcers who must decide whether to challenge a deal. Challenging a deal outright is expensive and risky, while allowing it to go through without any opposition seems naïve. One path that often seems to be a ‘win-win’ is to negotiate concessions to make the combination more palatable, while still allowing it to go through. These concessions can be sales of lines of business, known as ‘divestitures,’ or promises about conduct, known as ‘behavioral remedies.’ These promises are typically memorialized in a consent decree: a court-approved settlement that lets the deal close in exchange for a company’s word. Unfortunately, they often fail. And when they do, the damage is far harder to undo than it would have been to block the deal in the first place. The companies are already integrated and much harder to separate. Workers and consumers are already paying the price.
I spend most of my working life around data centers and the grid that feeds them. The thing I keep running into is that the public conversation only has one setting: data centers are a drain. That is half of a picture, and the missing half is more interesting than the half everyone argues about. The short version:
Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of AI promises to empower everyone. But it mistakes personal optimization for a shared society, writes Petter Bae Brandtzaeg. Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new vision of artificial intelligence, set out in his essay “The Future Is for Everyone,” promises that “superintelligence” will be available to everyone rather than concentrated in the hands of a few powerful institutions. His dream is that each of us will have a personal AI agent that understands our goals, protects our interests, and helps us become healthier, wealthier, more creative, and more capable. The problem with his “philosophy” is not the promise that everyone should benefit from AI. It is Zuckerberg’s individualistic account of what “everyone” means.
Meta will not be required to turn over more details about exactly how many jobs it expects to create and how much electricity it will use at its massive Hyperion data center in north Louisiana, after Republicans on the Louisiana Public Service Commission on Wednesday overrode a judge’s recommendation that the tech giant should provide the information. The decision, made in a party-line vote, was the latest by Republican leaders in Louisiana to support Meta in its push to build its data center in Richland Parish, after setting up tax incentives, approving electric infrastructure and fast-tracking Entergy’s plans to support a large expansion of the project.
Greenwood Village, CO (August 11, 2026) — BAM Broadband announced plans to construct a new state-of-the-art fiber network across several key South Metro Denver communities, specifically bringing service to the City of Castle Pines, the Town of Castle Rock, The Pinery in Douglas County, and the Cottonwood area which spans both the Town of Parker and Douglas County. This project represents another major milestone in BAM’s continued investment across the Colorado Front Range, providing residents and local businesses with a much-needed, high-speed alternative to traditional internet service providers.
AI is no longer just a research tool in Washington, D.C. — it's starting to shape how policymakers form opinions, according to Penta Group data shared exclusively with Axios. Why it matters: Policymakers are the latest to lean on AI for guidance, signaling its growing role in shaping decisions across markets, consumer behavior and now public policy. By the numbers: Penta Group surveyed 2,060 U.S. federal policymakers and senior staff across Congress, the administration and federal agencies, and found that 27% say AI informs their perspective on a topic — up from 17% in 2025 — putting AI on par with traditional sources like experts and web searches.
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