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Chairman Carr announces plan for a big auction of 160 MHz of prime mid-band spectrum, advancing America's wireless leadership.
Government Technology reports… Governments are developing maps to share information on a variety of topics with the public, but there are necessary considerations to ensure these digital products are accessible for all users. State and local governments are required by federal law to make digital products — including maps —usable for people with disabilities by April 2027 or April 2028 depending on population size. But they face litigation risks today if they are noncompliant.
The Morrison County Record posts an editorial from Keith Anderson, director of news for Adams MultiMedia of East Central Minnesota… Data centers, which have been around for years, are just now forcing their way into our lives thanks to massive proposals being flung at city councils and county boards across the nation, including Minnesota. Data centers of old were certainly impressive, but the computational power to feed AI programs today requires even more energy now that an estimated 1.5 to 2 billion people worldwide have integrated AI into their daily lives. Think back to the days when you entered a question into Google, and it popped out a series of potential resources you could peruse. Now, our prompts into ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude are more comprehensive...
The Democrat Star reports… The City of Elk River announced Tuesday that the data center developer who sought to open one in Elk River recently withdrawn their application. The move comes after the Elk River City Council unanimously rejected a proposed zoning amendment at their July 6 meeting.
President Donald Trump’s threats against broadcast television licenses are suddenly less of a laugh line to the media world and more of a real danger. Trump’s broadsides Thursday night against NBC and ABC were just the latest occasion during the past nine years when he’s called for revoking the licenses of TV outlets that anger him, this time after the two networks declined to air his White House speech on election security. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he said Thursday. But unlike Trump’s first term, when Republican leaders at the Federal Communications Commission disavowed any such reprisals, current Chair Brendan Carr has repeatedly opened probes and inquiries into the same TV networks that have drawn the president’s ire. And that has some policy veterans worried that the FCC may act this time, teeing up a constitutional fight.
County News Review reports… With the increase of proposed hyperscale data centers throughout the state, the Isanti City Council has approved a 30-month moratorium on them. Isanti Mayor Luke Merrill said he added the discussion of data centers to the July 7 council agenda so the council has time to create policies to prevent data centers from coming to the city if that’s the direction the city council decides to take. Following discussion, by a vote of 4-1 with Council Member Erika Zdon voting against, a motion was approved to put a 30-month moratorium on hypescale data centers within the city. While Zdon said she doesn’t want a data center coming to the city, she voiced concerns with how quickly the industry changes, and felt the council should wait to enact a moratorium.
Meta hired hundreds of contractors to pose as children and teenagers while asking chatbots like ChatGPT about suicide and even cannibalism.
A controversial new ruling from the Federal Communications Commission leaves no one responsible for regulating light pollution and other ill effects from skyrocketing numbers of satellites. A “space mirror” test satellite meant to beam sunlight and turn night into day on targeted swaths of Earth just received approval to proceed—and astronomers are aghast. The satellite, called Eärendil-1 and built by the California-based startup Reflect Orbital, would be the first of some 50,000 similar spacecraft the company hopes to launch by 2035. Critics say such plans are wholly unacceptable because light pollution from so many large, bright satellites would radically degrade views of the night sky.
The Digital Equity Act (DEA) Competitive Grant Program seems to be back with the US District Court of Washington DC decision published last night. thanks to this morning’s decision reached this morning (decision attached below).
In National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) v. Trump, decided by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The court decided that the President does not have the authority to simply cancel a congressionally created grant program because he disagrees with it. If you recall, the word “Equity” was (and remains) a trigger word for the Trump Administration, citing reverse discrimination. But in one instance, the court recognized that one provision of the DEA is, in fact unconstitutional as it expressly allows race to be taken into account when awarding grants. But instead of striking the whole act down, the unconstitutional race-based provision can be severed, allowing the remainder of the Digital Equity Act—including the Competitive Grant Program. The Act appropriated $2.75 billion to improve broadband adoption and digital literacy. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has championed the charge (and filed the lawsuit) to have DEA reinstated.
Case: National Digital Inclusion Alliance v. Trump, No. 25-3606 (D.D.C.), decided July 15, 2026 (Judge Bates). Read this first: it's not your money, but it's your template. This ruling is about the Competitive Grant Program ($1.25B, awarded directly to nonprofits, cities, and local entities), not the State Capacity/formula program ($1.44B) that flows to your office. Nothing here reinstates capacity dollars or changes state allocations. But the legal reasoning the court used, strike the one race-based provision, keep everything else, reinstate, is almost certainly the template that will decide the capacity money too. So the operational lesson matters to you even though the case doesn't. Three things the government had conceded by decision time: the court has jurisdiction, NDIA has standing, and the executive can't unilaterally cancel a program Congress created and funded over a policy disagreement. That left one government argument: the DEA is unconstitutional because it directs funding based on the race/ethnicity of populations served. The court agreed on a narrow point and rejected the broad one:
Decommissioning TDM and using IP has never been as easy it seemed it should have been. But at least the industry is working on it. Over two days, July 15-16, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission gathered carrier representatives, public-safety and 911 officials, engineers, and advocates to work through the hard remaining problems in retiring the legacy TDM and SS7 infrastructure. At times the proceedings seemed confused, with participants raising issues that did not technically appear to apply. The backdrop: the Commission has proposed to forbear from legacy TDM interconnection obligations at the end of 2028 — meaning that providers formerly required to interconnect with everyone else, and to furnish certain infrastructure and interconnection guarantees, would no longer have to. The goal is to complete a transition that has, in one form or another, been underway since VoIP was invented, but legally since the 2011 USF/intercarrier compensation transformation. Read my article on ALIII, a technical standard for accomplishing Voice Interconnection over the Internet here.
Every few years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tells Congress and the public what it intends to do with its authority. The agency's strategic plan is not a rulemaking and creates no legal obligations, but it is the framework around which the FCC builds its annual performance plan and budget request to Congress. The strategic plan also serves as the yardstick against which the agency's own annual performance reports—and outside overseers like the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)—measure whether the FCC did what it said it would do. The FCC's Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2026–2030, issued July 6, 2026, deserves a close read alongside the plan it replaces—the Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2022–2026, which has been pulled down from the FCC's website. Read side by side, the two documents describe two very different agencies.
A decade ago, I predicted the rise of intelligent applications. Today they are ubiquitous. The next decade’s work is harder and matters more: harnessing the capabilities of AI reasoning systems to continuously deliver economic and societal value; the ROI of AI. Getting there will take three harnesses working together: technological, economic, and political. I’d argue this is the defining challenge of the Reasoning Revolution. Right now, most of us are using a sliver of what these systems can do.
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In one of the world’s biggest technology hubs, a growing group of Seattle residents is trying something counterintuitive: spending a month with fewer digital distractions by trading smartphones for “dumb phones". Seattle helped create the modern smartphone era. Now, nearly 40 people in the heart of one of the world’s biggest technology hubs are voluntarily putting theirs away. The inaugural Month Offline Seattle cohort challenges participants to swap their smartphones for flip phones — or other “dumb phones” — for 35 days, gathering weekly for what organizers describe as part happy hour, part support group.
OpenAI and its revolutionary chatbot ChatGPT have single-handedly accelerated AI’s boom and threatened to upend much of how we work, create, learn, and communicate in the process. But when OpenAI was founded a decade ago, the company’s approach to artificial intelligence wasn’t taken seriously in Silicon Valley. Tech journalist Karen Hao has been covering OpenAI’s astounding rise for years and is the author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. She says that while many in Silicon Valley warn of AI’s sci-fi-like threats, the real risks are already here.
Sun This Week reports... The city of Apple Valley on July 9 joined a growing list of Minnesota cities that have enacted one-year moratoriums on new data center development. The City Council approved the pause on proposals for data centers, which are large buildings that hold computer servers. The sites can range from several thousand up to 2.5 million square feet as currently under scrutiny in Farmington. The cities of Eagan, Rosemount, Inver Grove Heights, Elk River and Minneapolis are among those enacting data center moratoriums similar to the Apple Valley ordinance.
MADISON — Gov. Tony Evers, together with the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC), today announced the release of the final Governor’s Task Force on Broadband Access annual report. The 2026 report highlights the work accomplished over the last year and describes the significant improvements made under Gov. Evers’ leadership to improve high-speed internet access, adoption, and affordability in Wisconsin.
“The Task Force’s sixth and final report captures the incredible work we have done over the past several years to close the digital divide in our state and ensure every Wisconsinite has the high-quality, affordable internet they need to succeed in the 21st Century, while also laying the groundwork for future leaders to carry on this important work,” said Gov. Evers. “I am so very proud of all we have accomplished to help hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses get connected, and looking ahead, leaders must continue these efforts to fill gaps, identify ways to support digital skills and affordability programs, and support workforce development efforts to ensure successful broadband deployment for Wisconsin’s kids, students, families, and communities both now and into the future.”
Marylanders stand to be harmed by new data centers. Our lawmakers failed to pass a bill that would protect us. We need to call on them to do what’s right. Data centers, massive plants that serve to power technology such as AI, are springing up across the country and state. These data centers promise jobs and technology advancement. Instead, they deliver noise pollution, decreases in property value, health issues and drastic increases in our utility costs. Despite the obvious harms and the pushback to data centers from across the state, we have no statewide regulations on data center development. In February, H.B. 120, a bill to ban construction of new data centers, died in the State House Environment and Transportation committee. This is a pressing issue across the state.
KYMN Radio reports… As traditional cable television subscriptions continue to decline, Northfield, MN, officials are exploring a broadband franchise fee as a way to replace lost revenue that has historically funded the city’s communications efforts and reduced pressure on property taxes. During a recent city council work session, City Administrator Ben Martig said cable franchise fees have long supported public communication infrastructure...
How do mobile networks hold up during a catastrophic natural disaster? And on the flip side, are they actually prepared for the massive data demands of the AI boom? The latest research from the Ookla analyst team dives into these issues. Here is a quick breakdown of our top three insights this week:
President Donald Trump called the Digital Equity Act, a Biden-era law to expand high-speed internet access, "racist" and "illegal." TRANSCRIPT-- WELL, IT TURNS OUT TRUMP MISREPRESENTED WHO THIS IS SUPPOSED TO HELP. HERE'S WHAT THE BILL ACTUALLY SAYS. YOU CAN SEE UNDER THE WORDS COVERED POPULATIONS. IT DOES INCLUDE MEMBERS OF RACIAL OR ETHNIC MINORITY GROUP THAT'S DOWN THERE. BUT IT ALSO INCLUDES AGING INDIVIDUALS, VEGGIE VETERANS. PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES AND LOOK AT THE VERY BOTTOM OF THIS LIST. PEOPLE WHO PRIMARILY RESIDE IN A RURAL AREA. NOW, WHEN THE ANALYSTS WE SPOKE TO PUT IT THIS WAY, ONLY ONE OF THE CATEGORIES IS RELATED TO RACE. WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE MAJORITY OF COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY THE DIGITAL DIVIDE, A FAR GREATER NUMBER OF FAMILIES ARE AGING. 4 IN THE WORLD COMMUNITIES. IN OTHER WORDS, THIS BILL WAS MEANT TO HELP A LOT OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE. NOT JUST PEOPLE OF A CERTAIN RACE.
MINNEAPOLIS (July 16, 2026) – Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), made the following statement in response to yesterday’s federal court ruling that Digital Equity Act programs should resume without any of the Act’s original race-based factors. “Yesterday’s ruling on the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program is, on balance, a victory. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance deserves enormous credit for fighting to get to this point. The court affirmed what should have been obvious all along: the Trump administration had no legitimate basis to hold this program hostage. The only real question now is how quickly NTIA moves to actually implement it.” “The removal of racial and ethnic minorities as a designated ‘covered population’ is a loss because the Trump administration continues to find ways to undermine populations that have been historically disadvantaged. But I don’t think it will significantly change who the program actually serves or what work gets done on the ground.
Baseball works because the teams don't negotiate the rules before every game. Tomorrow, July 15-16, 2026, the FCC opens a public workshop discussing the retirement of the TDM and SS7 network in favor of all-IP. We've been at this work for years -- but this time, there's much more momentum. Why can't telecom be a little more like baseball? We're even talking about an actual date to make it all active -- December 31, 2028. AT&T's Martin Dolly says it took his firm over two months to negotiate a single IP interconnect with Verizon. Now imagine there are over 1,500 Voice providers -- far more than a million relationships would be necessary to interconnect the way it's being done now. I am firmly pro-IP. I am not a fan of turning things off before we understand what needs to be turned on. NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association put it well -- we don't need to plan on a "sunset date" without a corresponding "sunrise date." A well-thought-through IP interconnection system needs to be in place before retiring the TDM obligations.
Comcast recently announced plans to spin off its entertainment businesses. The newly created NBCUniversal will include the NBC and Telemundo broadcast networks, Bravo, Peacock, the European media business Sky, along with theme parks and other businesses. The Peacock subsidiary has been actively buying rights to sporting events. Comcast had begun the spinoff of entertainment subsidiaries early this year when it spun off cable networks, including MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, E!, Syfy, Oxygen, the Golf Channels, and digital brands like Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes into the Versant Media Group. A Comcast shareholder will get a share of each new business. Comcast says it will retain a 19.9% share in NBCUniversal for at least a year. The post-split Comcast will retain the core broadband, cellular, and cable TV business lines
On July 15, 2026, Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a decision that could revive a federal grant program the President declared dead more than a year ago. In National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) v. Trump (Civil Action No. 25-3606), the court held that the Digital Equity Act of 2021 contains an unconstitutional racial classification, but that this single flaw does not doom the law. The court concluded that the relevant provision, which directs consideration of “individuals who are members of a racial or ethnic minority group” in awarding grants, can be ignored without impairing the operation of the rest of the statute (in legal parlance, “severed”). Thus, NDIA's claim to otherwise restore the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program survives, minus any consideration of the race or ethnicity of the people the grant projects serve. Most importantly for the cities, nonprofits, and digital inclusion practitioners who applied for—and in some cases won—Competitive Grant Program funds: the court relied upon the government’s submission that it would "now commit[] to restoring the Competitive Grant Program upon receiving this judicial determination." This is a ruling on the government's motion to dismiss the entire case, not a final judgment. The court has not ordered the program restored; it has held that the remaining aspects of NDIA's challenge may go forward. However, the resolution of the constitutional question essentially addresses the government's stated reason for ending the program.
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