The American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB) and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) Community Broadband Networks Initiative are continunig the year with another one of their increasingly popular and informative webinars.

Slated for July 7th from 12 to 1:00 pm ET, the livestream event – “Control + Shift + ALTernative: Building Community-Owned Fiber” – will be live on YouTube and feature an eye-opening conversation on building community-owned fiber.

The webinar will feature guest appearances by Pivot-Tech CEO Jim Cannon, General Manager of Port of Lewiston Scott Corbitt, Managing Director with Municipal Capital Markets Chris Perlitz, and Kendall County Administrator Christina Burns.

The webinar is open to community leaders, policymakers, broadband practitioners, and advocates nationwide

Picture Courtesy of Rise Above Research, CC BY-SA 3.0, Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

Congress should advance policies, including the Broadband and Telecommunications RAIL Act, that help build the infrastructure America needs for the next century of innovation.

Even with the U.S. holding vast mineral reserves, America is still 100 percent dependent on imports for some 17 key rare earth minerals.

The push to rebuild America’s shrunken industrial base is just beginning, but progress started during the Trump administration is reaching new heights under President Joe Biden, a sign that bipartisanship can still exist in American politics.

Of particular importance to the U.S. defense and renewable energy industries is the use of 17 “rare earth elements,” or RRE, that are vital to the 21st Century green economy. Electric car batteries need magnetized parts to hold their charges longer, and massive wind turbine generators need lightweight magnets to control their spinning blades and keep them from being torn apart in heavy winds. Only rare earth minerals with exotic names like neodymium, praseodymium and dysprosium can create these magnets.

Forterra has deployed more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs in conflict zones in Ukraine.

Forterra, a U.S. builder of autonomous vehicles, revealed today that more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs have been deployed in conflict zones in Ukraine for the past nine months, in what the company believes is the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in combat by any U.S. defense tech company.

“I believe this to be true of every defense technology that’s ever been created — until you hit the realities of combat, you’re just not going to know,” Scott Sanders, Forterra’s chief growth officer and a former U.S. Marine officer, told TechCrunch.

The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called “passthrough” fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find.

ISPs routinely advertise prices much lower than those actually charged to consumers on their monthly bills. One method of raising monthly bill prices above advertised rates is to tack on fees that, ISPs claim, are used to offset charges imposed by local governments.

FCC refuses to provide messages, has "wasted a year" of court's time, filing says. 

An advocacy group trying to investigate DOGE’s influence on the Federal Communications Commission accused the FCC of failing to comply with a public records request and of concealing Chairman Brendan Carr’s use of the Signal messaging service.

“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request,” journalist Nina Burleigh and advocacy group Frequency Forward said in a filing yesterday in US District Court for the District of Columbia. “The FCC acted in bad faith when it redefined the search criteria without notice to Plaintiffs or this Court. Further, the FCC acted in bad faith by concealing the fact that the Chairman Carr has a Signal account on a phone he uses to conduct government business.”

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr has been one of the most successful sycophants of Trump II thus far, as he increasingly finds creative ways to use his post as head of the communications commission to clamp down on free speech and punish and threaten those in the media whose coverage and commentary President Trump does not like. It’s a story TPM has been covering for months, since Carr’s first attempts to try to get comedian Jimmy Kimmel fired in September of last year.

We’ve got a new datapoint that feeds that hypothesis, courtesy of new reporting from Semafor today.

The daytime talk show “The View” reportedly turned down an offer from the office of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to have two of the Democratic socialist candidates he endorsed ahead of the Democratic primaries on the show for an interview, alongside the mayor.

Show bookers were reportedly open to having Mamdani himself on the show for a discussion, but turned down an opportunity to interview candidates Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who both went on to win the Dem nomination in their respective races. The reason they declined to have the candidates on was related to the threats that Carr has made against the program, per Semafor:

"Among other reasons, the show’s staff noted that it was proceeding cautiously with political candidate bookings while the FCC’s equal time inquiry was progressing."

For executives, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter v. Trump will likely lead to less certainty and consistency for the regulated aspects of their businesses, with federal rules and their enforcement increasingly determined by political expediency rather than expert analysis.

Specifically, there are five ways in which all U.S. businesses will be affected: regulation will become more informal and less transparent; consistency across administrations will disappear; oversight by Congress and the federal courts will be diminished; expert advice will be devalued; and politically-connected lobbyists will drive decision-making. In this environment, business leaders will need to plan accordingly, honing their ability to shift strategy, perhaps dramatically, after every election—and perhaps even during administrations.

 The 2,100-acre Virginia Digital Gateway project dies over a newspaper-notice technicality. The VDG Project faced several lawsuits despite initial approval. 

According to a Bloomberg report, the Blackstone-owned company formally submitted a written filing to the Virginia Supreme Court on July 2, explicitly stating it was withdrawing its last remaining appeal “after careful consideration”.

QTS’s withdrawal marked the official end of the project, as other stakeholders had earlier pulled out due to prolonged litigation. In a major win for opponents of the data center, the proposed land — situated at the edge of the Manassas National Battlefield Park, a historic Civil War battlefield — will now remain under its original rural zoning restrictions.

Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentation slides.

Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio.

How the Internet’s founding promise was handed to those who extinguished it.

In the spring of 1995 I found myself in a conference room in Ann Arbor, Michigan, making a presentation to the board of Merit Network — one of the most consequential regional academic networks in the United States and the organization that operated the NSFNET backbone on behalf of the National Science Foundation (NSF). I was there as a member of a team from telecom company Sprint, which was competing for the NSFNET’s successor services. My presentation was on the provision of Network Access Points — NAPs — that the NSF had specified in its request for proposals (RFP) for the transition of the NSFNET backbone to commercial operation. Merit though a key player was not exactly a happy audience. The NSFNET had been their project, their managed network infrastructure, their vision of what a publicly stewarded Internet could and should be. Now they were being asked to evaluate a presentation from one of the commercial operators that would replace it.

When I finished, the chair of FARNET — the Federation of American Research Networks, the body that represented the academic networking community whose interests were most directly threatened by what we were proposing — offered what I took to be a compliment. The NAPs, he said, would enable networks to interconnect, to eventually connect everyone. “A thousand points of light.” The phrase landed with a slightly awkward thud. It was borrowed from George H.W. Bush’s 1988 acceptance speech, where it had described citizen voluntarism — an oddly utopian register for a room full of network engineers contemplating a commercial handover. We took it as gracious. But I think everyone in that room understood, without saying so, that the thousand points of light he was describing and the thousand points of light we were actually building were not quite the same thing.

That gap — between the internet that the academic founders imagined and the Internet that commercial privatization actually produced — is what this piece is about.

Donald Trump's self-dealing and corruption are fostering an oligarchy, with laws organized by the Supreme Court. Can America defeat the vision offered eighty years ago of a cynical nihilistic society?

If I were to designate the patron saints of today’s grim festivities, I would pick two men: Roy Cohn and Aaron Director. Cohn created America’s modern political culture, while Director structured its legal assumptions.

Roy Cohn is a famous icon, the deeply cynical political consigliere of Donald Trump. He first came to national prominence in the 1950s, when he helped Senator Joe McCarthy organize the anti-Communist witch hunts. With his perch and his alliance with J. Edgar Hoover, McCarthy eliminated scores of leftist New Dealers from American political life, using his platform in the Senate to whip up a “Red Scare” about Communism. To his supporters, McCarthy could do no wrong, and any criticism was a result of leftist conspiracies. McCarthy was the first modern right-wing pundit, and Cohn helped him create a political template based on polarization.

Cohn was raw politics. He aided Ronald Reagan’s rise and mentored Donald Trump. I’m reading American Scoundrel, a biography of Cohn. It turns out Cohn’s family wealth came in part from the Bank of the United States, one of the big bank failures in the Depression, where his wealthy Jewish uncle stole from hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. Cohn saw this collapse as a conspiracy against his family, but the truth is he didn’t believe rules should apply to powerful insiders.

Then there’s Aaron Director, an equally cynical academic operative who created the law and economics movement. Director founded the Volcker Fund in the late 1940s after taking money from a right-wing foundation to build a set of scholars who would fight back against the New Deal. What he called the Free Market Study was massively influential, serving as the pro-monopoly incubator for Robert Bork, George Stigler and Milton Friedman.

AI is reshaping how mobile networks are used, and the networks that lead on traditional performance aren't always the ones ready for what comes next. Drawing on Speedtest Intelligence® data, this Ookla Research report benchmarks how prepared today's 5G networks are for the AI era, and where the gaps lie.

Meta Platforms said in a court filing on Monday that four states were seeking $1.4 ​trillion in penalties over accusations that the company designed its Facebook and Instagram platforms to addict young users.

Open source models’ success isn’t coming at the expense of frontier labs. Instead, they each seem to capture two phases of the same life cycle.

On Monday, Decagon CEO Jesse Zhang published a provocative new theory, posted under the title “Everyone is wrong about open source AI in the enterprise.” The post grapples with one of the most interesting contradictions of today’s AI economy: More mature AI deployments are switching to lighter models, he says, even at his own company. But the overall spend on expensive state-of-the-art models has barely budged.

It’s a new way to think about the relationship between frontier and open source models. In Zhang’s telling, they aren’t competitors, and open source models’ success isn’t coming at the expense of frontier labs. Instead, they’re two phases of the same life cycle, with expensive frontier models being used to prove out use cases that can be passed along to cheaper open source alternatives as they mature.

The left rail is frozen: EO 14365's four-step dependency chain, locked at step one because the DOJ §3 list never published. It stays in view as you scroll time on the right. The counter tracks guidance deadlines set and broken.

Four nondeployment-guidance deadlines set, all missed. A fifth now promised. A frozen EO 14365 dependency chain, a running broken-promise tally, and the October 1 wall where three regime shifts converge.

Former solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar is writing justifications for prediction market gambling apps, joining several Biden administration colleagues defending the industry.

From 2021 to 2025, Elizabeth Prelogar served as President Biden’s solicitor general, the top litigation job in United States law. Last month, Prelogar filed an amicus brief on behalf of a very different client.

Now in private practice at BigLaw firm Cooley LLP, Prelogar has apparently taken a contract with the Coalition for Prediction Markets, a lobbying group representing Kalshi and several crypto firms, including Coinbase. (The overlap between crypto and prediction markets is significant: Many prediction markets are built on crypto infrastructure, and several major crypto firms are now offering prediction market services.)

In 1877, Thomas Doolittle strung the first hard-drawn copper telephone wire in Ansonia, Connecticut, replacing the iron lines that had carried Alexander Graham Bell’s earliest calls.

Nearly 150 years later, most of the country is finally retiring the last copper in its telephone networks, replacing it with fiber-optic cable and wireless connectivity. 

California, naturally, has other ideas.

Much of the state’s copper network remains in place—powered, maintained, and protected by rules written for a monopoly telephone era that no longer exists. AT&T still provides old-fashioned “plain old telephone service” (POTS) to roughly 3% of households in its California territory. Yet the company spends about $1 billion a year keeping that network alive.

The reason is not consumer demand. It is state regulation. And the costs do not stop at California’s border. They fall on customers across the country.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now has a chance to fix that. AT&T has asked the FCC to declare that, once the agency authorizes POTS discontinuance under federal law, California’s carrier-of-last-resort (COLR) requirements are preempted. 

Inside sources revealed to Semafor that “The View,” the top-rated daytime talk show on television, succumbed to pressure from the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and “changed [its] programing,” the outlet reported Sunday night.

Back in February, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced that his agency was investigating the program for potential violations of a 1934 rule that mandates certain media stations provide equal time to political candidates. As noted by Semafor, “since then, the ABC talk show hasn’t featured a single political candidate running in a competitive midterm race.”

“The inquiry itself has been enough to force the network to hedge which guests appear on the show, a notable departure from The View’s previous booking decisions,” Semafor’s report reads.

“Trump’s FCC, led by its aggressive chairman, has been one of the most visible regulators of American communications in a generation. The simple threat of regulatory action is now enough to impact how media outlets behave.”

Last week, the South Carolina Broadband Office (SCBBO) announced that instead of its 16 designated subgrantees, the state would only need 8 to complete BEAD.

Before you assume that, like in other states, vendors walked away from BEAD, this is a case of Palmetto pragmatism.

State funding along with surplus ARPA funds thanks to projects coming in under budget, created $5.5M in funding to be allocated by the South Carolina broadband office. Funding will reach 1,458 locations with fiber. Prior to this allocation, state and ARPA funds totaling $400M connected ~112K South Carolina BSLs.

While some tech giants are looking to the stars for nearly limitless clean electricity, the actual path to commercial fusion energy involves an unexpected down-scaling, an expansion to traditional nuclear power, and a tight 2028 deadline. Go inside Seattle-area fusion startups Helion and Zap as they try to harness the reactions that power the sun.

Arizona residents in Havasu Heights, Donkey Acres, Crystal Beach and Yucca could gain access to expanded broadband service under a proposed franchise agreement now headed to the Mohave County Board of Supervisors.