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.

With the Supreme Court allowing the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, national and local economies could feel the sting.

Restricting legal immigration has been an all-consuming priority for President Donald Trump in both of his administrations. During his first term in office, Trump unsuccessfully attempted to rescind legal protections for migrants from several countries fleeing from violence, environmental disasters, and other extreme conditions. With the Supreme Court decision this week allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haitians and Syrians, the future of the program as a whole is at risk.

Removing TPS for approximately 330,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians is fundamentally a humanitarian issue, potentially forcing thousands to return to unsafe and even life-threatening circumstances in their home countries. But it will also have a dramatic economic effect within the United States, as the loss of workers and consumers will resonate in communities of all sizes throughout the country.

June 22, 2026 — It’ll be all eyes on the FCC Thursday as commissioners gather to consider a slate of actions that could get the ball rolling on reforms to broadband deployment permitting, E-Rate, and cable landing station licensing.

Here’s a breakdown of some key items on the FCC’s June 25 meeting agenda.

Safeguarding cable landing stations, E-Rate, and red tape around broadband deployments are on the docket for the FCC's June 25 open meeting.

The satellite industry is on the brink of a major transformation. With the rise of 5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), satellites are no longer limited to the niche role of providing backhaul for mobile networks in underserved areas. Satellites are increasingly providing 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) functionality to 5G enabled satellite terminals and off-the-shelf mobile devices (Direct-to-Device or D2D).

This transformation promises to extend secure, high-speed connectivity to virtually every corner of the globe, serving remote villages, manned and unmanned aircraft, maritime users, remote oil and gas and mining facilities to contested battlefields. But to realize this vision, we must build systems that are not only innovative, but also resilient, secure, and ready for real-world demands.

During negotiations on Wednesday, employees voiced frustrations with what they consider an unwillingness among executives to engage meaningfully with the prospect of unionization.

Washington, D.C. – In a letter sent to Congress today, more than 520 organizations from 48 states called for the enactment of a full nationwide moratorium on the approval and construction of new hyperscale data centers.

The letter was facilitated by the environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch; other signers include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Americans for Financial Reform, Popular Democracy, People’s Action Institute, Good Jobs First and Honor the Earth.

Add another name to Bellevue’s growing list of AI tenants.

Taiwan-based eNeural Technologies is setting up its North American headquarters in the city, joining a wave of AI companies — from CoreWeave to xAI to OpenAI — that have staked out office space east of Seattle over the past year.

eNeural plans to invest $3.5 million in the Seattle region over the next three years and create about 30 jobs, more than 20 of them AI engineering positions, according to Greater Seattle Partners, the regional economic development group that announced the expansion.

The company said it eventually envisions its Bellevue office growing into a core edge AI research and development center with more than 500 employees over the next decade.

According to a Thursday report from CNN, Thiel told the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Tuesday that the pope was inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” when he released a 42,000-word encyclical that called for strict regulation of AI, a technology that the pontiff said heightens the “risk of dehumanization” throughout the world.

Texas, Arizona, Illinois governors restrict data center tax incentives over energy costs. Virginia debates impact fees. Analysis of state data center policy shifts.

Recently, we wrote about how a few governors are beginning to institute restrictions on data centers, and in recent weeks, the trend has ramped up.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott (R) sent a letter to state regulators directing them to take action to insulate consumers from costs associated with data centers and outlining his legislative priorities for 2027.

In Arizona, lawmakers placed a pause on the state’s data center incentive at the urging of Governor Hobbs (D). And Illinois Governor Pritzker (D) paused the state’s data center credits in a move that mirrors Ohio Governor DeWine’s (R) recent actions.

Not every governor is moving in the same direction though. In Virginia, Governor Spanberger has pushed back on legislative proposals to curtail the state's data center tax exemption.

    New Community Technology Center expands digital access, remote work, telehealth, education, and high-speed Internet opportunities in rural Vermont. The initiative, funded on the back on a $2.9 million USDA Community Connect Grant, includes 2 gig symmetrical fiber connectivity to five different hubs: one in the town clerk’s office, one in the town garage, fire department, with the fifth hub located inside the Ryegate Library, in the town neighboring Groton.

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.

Last year, nearly 40% of all power demand from global data centers came from facilities based in America, per a new report.

As part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, Midjourney is seeking to compel those studios to reveal how they use AI themselves.

As a punishing heatwave bakes major East Coast cities, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright directed data centers in the mid-Atlantic this week to use their backup power supplies instead of using electricity from the public grid, in part to ensure there was enough electricity to power resident air conditioning.

The heat index topped 100 degrees by 10 a.m. Thursday in every major metro from Washington, DC, to New York City. And as the mercury climbed, so did the energy used for air conditioning.

“Maintaining affordable, reliable, and secure power in the PJM service territory is non-negotiable,” Wright said in a statement.

​Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff, and ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin today announced the launch of the AI for Good Global Commission. ​

The Commission brings together more than 40 Founding Members — including Heads of State and Government, industry CEOs and top executives, and Heads of UN agencies — to help define practical pathways to strengthen trust, expand access and unlock AI's potential to solve real-world challenges at the speed the technology demands.

The newly formed Commission occupies a unique position in the global AI landscape. By connecting leaders who build technology, deploy it at scale, shape policy and represent communities, the Commission seeks to help forge responsible AI solutions across sectors and borders while ensuring the participation of developing countries.

Amazon Leo's satellite count exceeds 390, clearing a path for competition with SpaceX's Starlink network to begin in earnest within months.

Amazon says the overnight launch of 29 satellites should clear the way for its Amazon Leo network to start offering commercial high-speed internet service from space this year, in direct competition with SpaceX’s Starlink network.

Firms today are pushing employees to use as much AI as possible to squeeze out the technology’s productivity gains. But that pressure is leading to cracks, and those cracks may be irreparable. 

Companies are racing to incentivize employees to use AI. But as some companies are finding, the more employees that use the technology, the heavier the bill.

Microsoft has reportedly begun canceling most of its direct Claude Code licenses, according to The Verge, instead moving engineers toward using GitHub Copilot CLI. That comes just six months after the firm first opened up access to Claude Code, encouraging thousands of its developers, project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding. The tech became popular fast. Perhaps too popular.

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Friends of Public Knowledge: It’s time to pause to celebrate, reflect, and envision the future of technology as Public Knowledge turns 25 years old this fall!

For a quarter century, Public Knowledge has served as one of the leading digital rights defenders in Washington D.C., working at the intersection of communications, media, and internet law to promote freedom of expression, an Open Internet, and access to affordable communications tools and creative works. And while our mission is easily found on our website, it is also lived in the values, work, and impact of dozens of Public Knowledge alumni and all of our allies. We are proud of the impact Public Knowledge has made over the years and we want you to join us this fall to help us leverage those 25 years of public interest work and impact for the future of technology policy.

Before I share how you can celebrate 25 years with us, let’s review some of our history and contributions.