Earlier this year the Trump administration decided to illegally dismantle the 2021 Digital Equity Act, which was intended to help push internet access into long-neglected parts of the U.S. The Act took very vague aim at digital redlining, or the longstanding practice by telecom giants of refusing to upgrade (or at times even timely repair) broadband service in minority and low-income neighborhoods.

Big ISPs like AT&T have long been caught not only refusing to upgrade or repair broadband access in minority areas of cities like Detroit and Cleveland, but charging minority neighborhoods more money for slower service than their less diverse, more affluent counterparts.

The bill removes many important requirements from the law and again delays the effective date.

In 2024, the Colorado Legislature passed a first-in-the-nation AI law regulating the use of AI in making important decisions about Coloradans’ access to jobs, health care, education, housing, and other life necessities. Gov. Jared Polis signed the law despite expressing “reservations.” Ever since its passage, the Colorado AI Act has been at the center of state and federal discussions about how to regulate AI. 

This week, the Colorado Legislature passed SB 26-189, a bill that repeals significant portions of the Colorado AI Act and further delays its effective date. Gov. Polis has publicly indicated that he will sign the legislation. This move comes after failed attempts to amend the law during the 2025 legislative session and a 2025 special session called by Gov. Polis, in part, to consider amendments to the AI Act. 

A federal Crown corporation quietly financed the gas plant behind Meta's $13-billion Alberta data centre — and stayed silent about it for three weeks. Here’s how the story broke, and what it reveals about who’s really paying for Alberta’s AI boom.

A bipartisan coalition of former high-ranking Federal Communications Commission personnel urged the FCC to drop its ongoing early license renewal proceeding against ABC, calling the move “an assault on free speech disguised as regulatory process.”

The FCC in April ordered the Disney-owned ABC to file license renewals for its eight television stations by late May – years ahead of schedule. The order said the commission was investigating the stations “for possible violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC’s rules, including the agency’s prohibition on unlawful discrimination.”    

Disney said in response that it was “confident” its “record demonstrates our continued qualifications as licensees under the Communications Act and the First Amendment and are prepared to show that through the appropriate legal channels.”    

The FCC issued a Strategic Plan for 2026 to 2030 that describes a significant change in the focus of the agency. The FCC has periodically issued strategic plans since it was directed to do so by the Government Performance and Results Act in 1997. The strategic plan doesn’t change any FCC rules. It’s more of

an outline of how the agency views its function and defines its priorities going forward. The plan has one formal use, which is to define the yardstick by which the GAO will measure whether the FCC is doing what it said it would do.

https://www.fcc.gov/document/strategic-plan-2026-2030

This is what experts are worried about, right? The data centers are such a big load on the grid that they can have detrimental impact on the surrounding grid,” an engineer said.

Just before 8 a.m. Wednesday, electricity flickered on and off for about 10 minutes. An engineer’s data says it happened throughout the Eastern half of the U.S., from Chicago, to Boston and Miami.

He ties the problem to Data Center Alley in Ashburn, Virginia, and says the seemingly small blip is a sign our infrastructure is in danger.

Experts say cracks in our infrastructure grid are starting to show as the data center industry consumes electricity at a rate the world has never experienced. On Wednesday, a crack became visible to millions of Americans in their homes and businesses.

A new preprint study of authoritarianism-enabling AI presents another set of evidence of the gaps in safeguards, writes Tim Bernard.

Technologies cannot typically be accurately described as intrinsically authoritarian. However, as many Tech Policy Press readers know, technology can, and is, used to advance authoritarian goals. The various forms of AI are no exception. In the US, there has been recent scrutiny of tools being developed for ICE to identify deportation targets, and longstanding issues have been identified with predictive policing systems that purport to identify where crime is likely to occur or who is likely to commit a crime. Emerging from a fully-authoritarian context, China’s DeepSeek LLM has been shown to adhere to its homeland’s communications policy regarding Taiwan and the 1989 events at Tiananmen Square.

As illustrated by the policing examples above, authoritarianism-enabling AI goes beyond LLMs and frontier models, and includes systems that have been in place for some time. What then makes AI of particular interest in this context? In a new preprint study, “From Democracies to Autocracies: How AI Systems Enable Authoritarianism by Design,” policy researchers Jeba Sania, Marta Ziosi, and Fazl Barez draw together common threads amongst AI systems of concern, noting that they include “specific features such as statistical learning, extensive data collection and analysis, and black-box algorithmic decision-making that resists explainability and thus evades effective oversight.”

Benedict Cumberbatch, Alan Cumming and Benedict Wong have urged the U.K. government to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, saying it “threatens to inflict immense harm on the British public.”

In an op-ed addressed to culture minister Lisa Nandy, the trio said her intervention could be “prove one of the most important decisions any culture secretary has taken for UK film, television and media in a generation.”

Meta's $50 billion AI data center in Louisiana is facing scrutiny over secrecy, energy demands, public incentives and its impact on locals.

Meta’s massive artificial intelligence data center in rural northeastern Louisiana has become a symbol of the extraordinary infrastructure race unfolding behind the rapid expansion of AI, with the project drawing scrutiny over its scale, energy needs, financing arrangements and the secrecy surrounding the deal that brought it to the region.

The project, known as Hyperion, is expected to represent an investment of more than $50 billion and span nearly 10 million square feet, making it the largest data center in Meta’s global fleet. The facility is designed to provide 5 gigawatts of computing capacity for AI workloads, including the training and development of large AI models.

The development has transformed Richland Parish, a predominantly rural area in northeast Louisiana, as Meta and its partners build the infrastructure required to support increasingly power-intensive AI systems.

The scale of the project has also raised questions about how the deal was negotiated.

In the U.S. Market, everyone beat something in the June quarter, but investors only cared about what sat underneath the beat.

The market was not rejecting telecom, but it was separating valuable growth from expensive growth.

"That distinction reveals something much larger. The fastest-growing businesses in US telecom are increasingly built on infrastructure created for another purpose. Cable is selling mobile service through wholesale agreements and WiFi. Wireless carriers are selling home broadband through spectrum bought for smartphones. Verizon is selling dark fiber to hyperscalers building AI infrastructure."

The networks are still being built. AT&T alone plans to invest between $23 billion and $24 billion annually through 2028. But a growing share of the next dollar of revenue is coming from finding a second customer for an asset that already exists.

Telecom has discovered capacity arbitrage.

Paramount Skydance announced that it was halting its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery until July of next year after a lawsuit from Democratic states. Paramount is also facing a lawsuit from the Writers Guild of America, which argues that the merger would lead to job losses for screenwriters and journalists.

Paramount Skydance is run by David Ellison, whose father, Larry Ellison, is the billionaire founder of Oracle and a prominent ally and financial backer of President Trump. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that it may be time to “pace” AI development so the world will be ready for it.

His change of position comes after "the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally."

“We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels,” he told Patrick O’Shaughnessy, the host of the Invest Like the Best podcast, while also “trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs.”

Larry Ellison and his family would be on the hook for $9.8 billion if Paramount Skydance Corp.’s deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. falls apart.

Federal Communications Commission IP Transition Workshop--An AI Summary - July 15-16 2026

Session-by-Session Summary

VIDEO | RECAP EN / ES / FR

MinnPost reports…

This summer, across Minnesota and the country, concern over data centers has grown into a full-blown movement, capturing the press, focusing alarm at emerging AI technology and becoming a litmus test for political candidates.

But while opponents are channeling much of their energy into turning the court of public opinion against these projects, Pine Island’s case shows that rulings coming out of actual courtrooms can alter the trajectory of developments.

Microsoft bolstered its AI cybersecurity offerings this week with the launch of its first AI security model and a new security platform.

Microsoft on Monday launched its first cybersecurity-specialized model alongside a new AI cybersecurity platform at a small event in San Francisco, taking a big swipe at major players in the space — namely Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.

The company describes MAI-Cyber-1-Flash as a model that’s built “to find challenging vulnerabilities in complex codebases.” The model is built to animate MDASH, Microsoft’s harness dedicated to software vulnerability identification and remediation.

Our high‑altitude platform and phased‑array antenna deliver ubiquitous, high‑bandwidth, low‑latency coverage from the stratosphere, at a fraction of the cost of terrestrial networks and LEO satellite solutions.

Accessible anywhere, fueled by clean hydrogen, powered by World Mobile Chain.

Outdated rules tying carriers to copper phone lines are diverting billions from fiber and wireless buildout, and the FCC should finish modernizing them.

But there’s an obstacle to next-generation networks that too few realize: Legacy rules that bind carriers to the copper networks of yore. These rules require carriers to constantly reinvest in copper wires, dedicate largely empty buildings to 1980s technology, and prevent telephone traffic from being routed and exchange efficiently.

These rules are enormously expensive. AT&T alone spends more than $6 billion each year maintaining copper lines. And AT&T is only one example: 2,425 voice service providers incur unnecessary costs to interconnect with and support the legacy network. 

As data centres have grown in size and number in Australia, they have also become the subject of fierce public debate. So what’s the best way forward?

At first glance a data centre looks like a bland, boring warehouse. But these buildings, stacked with thousands of servers, are the beating heart of the internet and the booming artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

As data centres have grown in size and number in Australia, they have also become the subject of fierce public debate. State and federal governments, as well as the tech industry, are pushing for new data centres to be rapidly built in addition to the roughly 160 that already exist around the country.

How does geography impact AI performance? Our latest study examines how 5G latency varies across U.S. cities, exploring the role of infrastructure in cloud responsiveness.

Latency – the time it takes for data to travel from a user to a server and back – is becoming an important factor in AI performance. That’s because advanced AI services often do their calculations inside data centers hosting servers used by the likes of Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and Microsoft. Network latency is a part of the path necessary to extricate AI computations from a hyperscaler’s cloud and deliver them to an end user.

Further, time-sensitive AI applications – like real-time video analysis or voice chatting – will need low latency connections in order to quickly shuttle AI computations to the users (or robots or agents or whatever) who need them. As AI matures, these snappy connections may grow in importance.

But, as Ookla’s mobile 5G data shows, cloud latency can be impacted by a variety of factors including geographic location, internet routing infrastructure, and operators’ traffic steering, peering, and interconnect policies.