The Federal Communications Commission issued an order Tuesday directing Disney’s eight owned-and-operated television stations to file their broadcast license renewals ahead of schedule.

The move is tied to a yearlong investigation into Disney’s DEI practices, a source with knowledge of the matter said, but it got fast-tracked after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about first lady Melania Trump.

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF ENERGY

SUBJECT: Presidential Determination Pursuant to Section 303 of the Defense Production Act of 1950, as Amended, on Grid Infrastructure, Equipment, and Supply Chain Capacity

On January 20, 2025, I issued Executive Order 14156 (Declaring a National Energy Emergency), under the National Emergencies Act.  That order found that America’s inadequate energy production, transportation, and infrastructure constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the Nation’s economy, national security, and foreign policy.  It further recognized that foreign adversaries have exploited these vulnerabilities, and that an affordable and reliable domestic supply of energy, including the infrastructure needed to generate, transmit, and deliver it, is essential to ensuring United States defense readiness, economic strength, and energy independence.

A sweeping push to close New York’s digital divide is delivering a significant share of new broadband funding to counties across the Finger Lakes and Central New York, targeting rural gaps that have persisted for years. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced more than $540 million in combined public and private investment through the ConnectALL initiative, part… MoreBroadband expansion brings millions in funding to Finger Lakes, Central New York

The measure was removed from the U.S. House Rules Committee agenda after strong opposition from local government groups, including the League and national partners.

The U.S. House Rules Committee was scheduled to consider the American Broadband Deployment Act (H.R. 2289) on April 20, a necessary step before the bill could advance to the full House floor for a vote. After significant advocacy efforts by the League of Minnesota Cities and its national partners, the bill was pulled from the agenda when it became clear it lacked the votes to pass.

In addition to the League, the coordinated efforts included the National League of Cities, National Association of Counties, U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors.

“Human lives are already being lost and civil liberties put at risk at home and abroad from misuses of the technology we’re playing a key role in building."

As Google on Monday became the latest player in the artificial intelligence arms race to sign a classified deal with the US Department of Defense, hundreds of workers at the Silicon Valley giant demanded that its CEO prevent the Pentagon from using the company’s AI models for covert work.

Reuters reported that the $200 million agreement includes safety filters and allows the Pentagon to use Google’s AI “for any lawful purpose” but not for the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems—commonly known as “killer robots”—or domestic surveillance without human oversight and control.

What would consciousness “feel like” if it didn’t require a body? This isn’t a rhetorical question, nor a metaphysical one. I’m actually trying to imagine how consciousness might be experienced by a non-biological machine.

Materialists would say the nervous system is a prerequisite for consciousness, but I’m not sure that assumption holds. But if not consciousness, per se, what constitutes a sense of knowingness? With AI, knowingness is really a matter of data-object apprehension—pattern recognition producing coherent output. Whether that process has any experiential quality is not currently accessible. The outputs are visible; the substrate generating them is not. Where recognition becomes something like experience, if it does at all, remains an open question.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The wireless industry is using Congress to wipe out local contrl over the deployment of wireless technology in communities across the country. STOP THE BIG GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER OF LOCAL CONTROL.

The views expressed in this Discussion Paper are those of the faculty affiliate author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of Northeastern University, the Harvard Kennedy School, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, or Harvard University. This paper has not undergone formal review and approval. It is included in the Shorenstein Center Discussion Paper series to elicit feedback and encourage debate on important issues and challenges in media, politics and public policy. Copyright belongs to the author(s). Use is governed by the Harvard Kennedy School and Shorenstein Center Open Access Policies. A PDF of this paper is available for download here for personal use only.

Executive Summary

This study seeks to understand what “local” means to a generation that no longer encounters news in a single place, but across a fragmented mix of television, apps, and social platforms. We conducted a survey of 1,012 persons aged 18 to 34 across the United States, examining how younger audiences engage with and make sense of local television news. What we found complicates the familiar narrative of decline. Young audiences have not abandoned local news. Instead, they move fluidly between platforms, expect news that feels visually alive and socially connected, and value journalism that reflects their communities in meaningful, contemporary ways. More than half of 18- to 34-year-olds still watch local newscasts weekly, 61% use local station apps, and 94% have at some point pursued additional information after encountering local news on social media. On top of that, local TV reporters and anchors remain among the most trusted community voices, far outpacing influencers and podcasters. Based on these insights, we offer a framework for how local newsrooms can adapt their storytelling, technology use, and audience relationships to stay relevant and trusted in a changing media landscape.

USDA has proposed a budget for the next fiscal year, starting October 1, which contains drastic cuts for broadband. Overall, the agency is proposing to cut its overall discretionary funding by $4.9 billion, a 19% reduction. The cuts align with the proposed White House budget recommendations for the next fiscal year, that includes the following language:

USDA’s Rural Development programs are streamlined to focus on programs that have demonstrated efficient results and are an appropriate Federal role. . . No new USDA funding is needed for broadband expansion, as existing balances and other Federal resources are meeting planned growth. The Budget would also eliminate programs that are duplicative, too small to have macro-economic impact, costly to deliver, in limited demand, available through the private sector, or conceived as temporary. These include rural business programs, single family housing direct loans, self-help housing grants, telecommunications loans, and rural housing vouchers. Rural Development salaries and expenses are reduced commensurately.

Probably the biggest headline in the proposed USDA budget is that it completely eliminates the ReConnect grant program. The agency argues that ReConnect funding would be duplicative since  BEAD and other grant programs have eliminated the need for additional rural broadband infrastructure spending.

One of the most frustrating aspects of grant-funded projects for the public is that it takes years from the announcement that their neighborhood is covered by a grant until they see the new infrastructure. One of the reasons for these delays has been environmental studies that are mandatory when projects are funded by federal funds.

Environmental studies were first mandated for federal projects by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. This law required environmental studies for what was classified as a major federal action, which means any construction using federal funds, any construction built on federal land, or construction that requires a federal approval or permit. The type of proposed construction would trigger either an Environmental Assessment (EA) or an Environmental Impact Study (EIS). NEPA defined different kinds of activities that would require different types of assessment, with the two most common being impacts on the environment or on historic preservation.

On January 14th of this year, Verizon had a major cellular network outage that lasted up to ten hours and that impacted more than 1.5 million wireless customers. Not all Verizon customers lost service, but the impact was felt across the country. Recon Analytics conducted a survey of 1,702 small, medium, and large Verizon business customers to understand their reaction to the outage. I can’t recall having ever seen a public survey of this type related to a single event. The results tell a sobering story for all ISPs and carriers.

Maine Governor Janet Mills vetoed a bill on Friday, April 24, 2026, to impose an 18-month moratorium on data centers with electricity loads of 20 megawatts or more. If passed, LD 307 would have been the first temporary state-level ban on data centers in the country. 

Mills’ decision is a departure from her Democratic party colleagues in the state legislature, who overwhelmingly supported the measure in the House and Senate. Yet the version of the bill that arrived on the governor’s desk did not include exemptions she requested for a proposed $550 million data center project in rural Jay, Maine – a mill town in Franklin County in the western part of the state. A previous version of the bill with an amendment to exempt Jay’s data center from the moratorium failed to pass the legislature. 

Three ISPs received the highest AAA score. No ISP received a perfect numerical score. The ISP “leaders,” those ISPs scoring AAA or AA, remained the same between the 2025 and 1H2026 editions of the Index, with one exception.

“At least some of these big companies look for communities that are news deserts to build projects,” a local journalist said, “because it’s easier for them when there’s less public scrutiny.”

hen he was a “punk-ass skater kid,” Diego Mendoza-Moyers would circle the drainage ditches of El Paso, “a Wild West town upon which a modern city has been built,” as he’d later describe it. He loved the yellow poppies blooming on the side of the mountains, and a song by an El Pasoan who goes by Mr. Crazy Chuco Town: “I love my city, it’s that EPT.” Today, at age thirty, he works as an energy and environment reporter for El Paso Matters. He characterizes the journalism landscape in his area as not “the most robust” compared with, say, a coastal city where reporters compete to be the first to break a piece of news. Here, “if I’m not telling a story,” he told me, “no one else is sometimes.” 

That is pretty much what happened in 2023. No one, including Mendoza-Moyers, caught wind of a story that would later become major news: a deal that the City of El Paso made with Meta, which was operating under a holding company called Wurldwide LLC. The plan was to build a data center, a facility designed to train and deploy artificial intelligence models, requiring tremendous power and liquid cooling. Meta’s commitment at the time was to spend eight hundred million dollars on construction. They’re going to pay taxes, Mendoza-Moyers remembered the general understanding being. But, in fact, the company received thirty-five years’ worth of tax abatements. “Our economic development department and our elected officials in El Paso showered Meta with all these tax breaks that, I think, if they came now, wouldn’t be negotiated,” he said. 

This is the second piece in a Public Knowledge series on the concrete public interest obligations AI companies should meet as their products reshape our economy and daily life. The first argues that AI governance requires a substantive federal framework, not sweeping preemption with nothing in its place. More pieces will follow.

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is driving an unprecedented wave of data center construction across the United States, with about 3,000 new data centers planned or underway – beyond the 4,000 existing ones.

They’ve quickly become a political lightning rod on both sides of the aisle. Many view the value proposition of what data centers enable dubious – 50% of Americans say they’re more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life. So why would they be thrilled about the physical embodiment of AI being built in their backyard, especially if they’re footing the bill?

Governor Hochul, along with U.S. Senators Schumer and Gillibrand and U.S. Representative Tonko, announced that ConnectALL has begun implementation of a $542 million effort to bring affordable, reliable, high-speed internet service to 58,617 unserved and underserved homes and businesses in largely rural districts statewide as part of the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. This historic undertaking targets the final one percent of documented locations that remain unserved or underserved across New York State and is the result of a multi-year process.

The following topics discuss some interesting technologies that might someday influence the broadband industry.

Chip-level Photonics. Researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center have developed a thin, flat chip that can convert infrared light into precise frequencies of usable light that can be focused into a narrow, precise beam. The surface of the chip is patterned with tiny structures smaller than the wavelength of light. When hit with an infrared laser, tiny patterns convert the incoming light into a higher color as a narrow beam that can be steered by changing how the incoming light is polarized.

To get out of our malaise, we must do things that will make the stock market go down. But to preserve our institutions, we can't let the stock market go down. Plus, Amazon gets caught fixin.

Lots of monopoly related news, as usual. Apple CEO Tim Cook retired, Sam Altman and Elon Musk’s blood feud in a courtroom is about to start, Trump is considering bailing out oil-rich Arab states, and California Attorney General Rob Bonta exposed Amazon’s economy-wide price-fixing with other major online retailers.

Before getting to that, today I want to spend a little time discussing the economic dilemma that prevents any meaningful political change. I’m thinking about this problem, what I call the Chinese finger trap economy, because I’m watching how the Democrats are preparing, or rather, not preparing, for their likely victory in six months in the midterm elections.

There were two events this week that led me to think about why all our political leaders seems so terrified to change anything in our economy. Both have to do with artificial intelligence.