Texas froze BEAD disbursements after months of scrutiny. Here’s what we know, what is being alleged, and what the audit trail should reveal.

The Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO) notified BEAD subgrantees on August 10, 2026, that all disbursements were being placed on hold.

For broadband providers, cooperatives, and rural communities that have spent years planning for Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program deployments, this is not a minor delay. For subgrantees, this impacts staffing, outside plant contracts, construction plans, and cash flow.

The BDO has been facing questions from the legislature for the last several months about the program. With new leadership at the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, it seems that the program is now facing more oversight than just from the legislature. The Texas Tribune reported that the hold will remain in effect until further notice.

Y Combinator alumnus Apollo Atomics is shrinking a key nuclear reactor part, which promises to slash the cost of electricity below natural gas.

The nuclear power industry is undergoing something of a renaissance, with startups raking in funding to develop advanced reactors in a quest to lower costs. But based on recent projections, it’s unlikely those reactors will be cost-competitive anytime soon.

Assil Halimi and Drew Walker, the founders of Apollo Atomics, think that’s because companies have been chasing the wrong problem. So instead of designing a new reactor, Apollo is rethinking the way thermal energy is converted into electricity.

There has been a lot of talk about how AI is putting stress on broadband networks, and many analysts are claiming that we need faster broadband speeds to accommodate growing AI traffic. I was particularly struck by a comment from NTCA – the Rural Broadband Association in a filing at the FCC earlier this year in the FCC docket looking at USF reform. NTCA wrote, “The burgeoning growth of [artificial intelligence] demands modern networks with upload speeds much closer to symmetrical to support the applications and devices that it supports.” The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) told the FCC in 2025 that the 20 Mbps upstream standard is far too low and should be increased to 100 Mbps.

The FCC definition of broadband of 100/25 Mbps was adopted in March 2024. However, Commissioner Rosenworcel had been pushing for the increase to 100/20 Mbps for several years before that. It had been clear to everybody but the Ajit Pai FCC that the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband was obsolete when the FCC’s mapping in 2022 showed that 90% of homes already had access to 100 Mbps download speed.

All of this leads me to ask if the 100/20 Mbps definition is already obsolete. Recent data from OpenVault says that 43% of U.S. households now subscribe to speeds faster than 500 Mbps download and 70% of homes subscribe to speeds of 200 Mbps or faster. It’s hard to look at these statistics and think that 100/20 Mbps should be the standard.

Unfortunately, the definition of broadband has political and financial overtones.

Today, The Future of Universal Service Reform Task Force, co-chaired by Mignon Clyburn and Rachelle Chong, released a comprehensive policy framework, “Moving Toward Opportunity for All: The Future of Universal Service Reform,” addressing the long-term structural, legal, and financial sustainability of the $8+ billion Universal Service Fund, or USF.

The Universal Service Fund has served as the backbone of the nation’s digital infrastructure for nearly three decades, ensuring that students, healthcare providers, and families stay connected. However, shifting technology landscapes, evolving economic realities, and recent legal challenges require a modernized approach to secure its long-term viability for current and future generations. 

Convened by Keep Our Communities Connected (KOCC) and the Schools, Health, and Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition, the Task Force represents a balanced cross-section of consumer advocates, industry leaders, educational stakeholders, and healthcare experts – including experts at Public Knowledge. Public Knowledge agrees that modernizing the USF – essential for connecting our communities – remains a major priority and that this report helps chart a path forward.

An expert from Clearfield explains why distributed fiber optic sensing has become popular with carriers that want to boost their ROI.

Distributed fiber optic sensing technology is a hot item in the telecom industry right now because it allows operators to leverage existing cables, says Robert Paul, who works with the strategy and market development team for fiber-optic technology producer and manufacturer Clearfield.

Recently, in July, Clearfield announced an expansion of their broad fiber portfolio to include distributed fiber optic sensing technology.

Currently, Clearfield says their distributed fiber optic sensing portfolio includes three types of sensing cables designed to monitor different conditions across fiber routes and facilities:

As public opposition to AI data centers grows nationwide, Microsoft points to its 20-year success in Quincy, Wash. But can this rural model survive today's energy crisis?

As data center backlash builds nationwide, Microsoft is pointing to Quincy, Wash., as Exhibit A in making the case that it’s a company communities can trust. But it’s not clear whether the conditions that made things work 20 years ago in the rural city still apply today.

On Thursday, Microsoft celebrated the community as the home of its first data center, hosting a public party and awarding $210,000 in grants to local organizations. Over its two decades in Quincy, the company has created jobs and contributed to property taxes that helped fund infrastructure including a high school and police station. The local poverty rate more than halved over 10 years, dropping to 13% in 2023.

“The story of Quincy, Washington, and Grant County is a story of data centers gone right,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a GeekWire interview.

The Yakama Nation is among the opponents, citing the cultural importance of the site.

The FCC’s broad power to require broadcast media to operate in “the public interest, convenience, and necessity” has long been a loaded gun available for abuse, and it has lately been used to justify a shocking rise in government speech suppression. The next Congress must pass legislation to narrow and define it.

After Noel Pichardo called out his city's embrace of Flock surveillance cameras, he was subjected to five internal affairs investigations in less than two years.

On an early fall afternoon in 2023, midway through a shift in Pawtucket’s District Five, Rhode Island police officer Noel Pichardo noticed a strange camera perched on a utility pole over West Avenue.

Pichardo was 28, five years into the job, and alone in his cruiser during one of the brief lulls between responding to the typical churn of radio calls for domestic disputes, petty disturbances, and welfare checks. The camera was compact and solar-powered, angled down toward passing traffic. Pichardo made a U-turn and drove beneath it again, more slowly this time, to get a better look.

He then began searching for the cameras on roads near highway ramps, at major intersections, along the routes into and out of the city. He found them again and again. By the time Pichardo finished circling the district, he knew exactly where he had seen them before.

Two years earlier, officers had gathered on the second floor of a small police substation in Pawtucket for a presentation about a surveillance system made by Flock Safety. 

For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon.

On Monday, 404 Media revealed that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported.

Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, 404 Media documented.

The latest chapter in dramatic saga Disney laid down the gauntlet like Thor against the FCC Tuesday as the company has filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the agency over its broadcast licenses of its eight ABC-owned stations, stating its regulatory actions and investigations are "retaliatory".

In the lawsuit, Disney stated that “[A]cting through the Federal Communications Commission, the [Trump] Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” referring to Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes about the President on his late-night show and whether or not to count The View as a talk show exempt from equal-time rules. 

Filed in Washington D.C. District Court, the lawsuit also seeks to stop proceedings through a restraining order and an injunction related to broadcast licenses in eight cities, including WLS-TV in Chicago. In April, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr ordered an early license renewal review of ABC’s eight stations, which weren’t due until 2028 or later. Carr was named in the suit, as was commissioners Olivia Trusty and for litigation reasons, Anna Gomez, who as a Democrat, blasted her own agency for its actions.

The suit mentioned numerous infractions Trump has accused the network of, including the 2024 Presidential debate they aired, and a joke Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk after his death last September, which led station groups Nexstar and Sinclair to temporarily pull the show, which forced ABC to suspend it.

The license review came shortly after Kimmel made a joke about Trump’s appreance, saying his wife Melania looked like “an expected widow”, with the FCC stating it was because of “DEI violations”. With the public comment period now closed, the agency could start a hearing designation soon, which starts the adjudication process. 

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has made it his mission to punish licensees who broadcast content that criticizes President Trump and any aspect of his agenda.  Both Carr and the President have exercised their personal First Amendment rights to excoriate all national broadcast networks, except FOX, for offenses including failing to carry all news conferences, and using comedy to mock the President and First Lady.

ABC, in particular, has incurred the President’s wrath, and Chairman Carr’s displeasure. The FCC has notified ABC that all of its broadcast licenses will be up for renewal evaluation years before the conclusion of their existing term.  On 4 occasions, the Commission has demanded ABC provide evidence that it has not used Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies to disadvantage existing or prospective white employees.

In this exclusive E&P op-ed, former broadcast journalist and Media Action Center founder Sue Wilson warns that the FCC’s unprecedented handling of ABC’s broadcast licenses could have consequences reaching far beyond Disney.

Wilson—whose organization filed a Petition to Deny in the ABC licensing case—argues that Chairman Brendan Carr’s actions threaten broadcasters’ editorial independence and sideline the public from the licensing process.

With the agency’s only administrative law judge having quietly retired, she questions who will provide independent oversight. Wilson contends that the dispute ultimately threatens Americans’ First Amendment right to receive news free from government intimidation.

For too long, this law has allowed the government to evade privacy protections and spy on Americans. Reform is overdue.

Congress will soon vote on the reauthorization of a surveillance authority known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire on June 12. Although Congress passed the law to facilitate surveillance of foreigners overseas, the government also uses Section 702 to spy on Americans — a practice that has resulted in widespread abuses and made the law deeply controversial. The upcoming reauthorization is an opportunity for Congress to enact long-overdue protections for Americans’ privacy.

President Trump is encouraging Congress to renew Section 702 without such protections, known as a straight reauthorization. Lawmakers from both parties, however, have expressed opposition to an extension without reforms. At this stage, it remains unclear whether congressional leadership will allow proposed reforms to receive a vote — but it is equally unclear whether reauthorization can move forward without reforms.

Elon Musk's plan to compete against AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon through a network of small cells has been widely ridiculed.

Several more wireless experts serve harsh judgment on Elon Musk's plan to build a US network of small cells.

For years, subscribers to satellite services have installed dishes at their homes for watching TV or connecting to broadband.

Smartphone customers, by contrast, aren't normally required to set up a basestation and cover the related property fees. Elon Musk wants to change all that through a widely ridiculed plan of Starlink, the satellite comms subsidiary of his overvalued SpaceX business. Experts with anything positive to say about it seem to be rarer than Mars landings.

The small cell technology Musk wants to combine with Starlink's satellite receivers would naturally sit on your rooftop. But it wouldn't be for your exclusive benefit, instead providing coverage for passersby on Starlink plans.

Author: Federal Communications Commission Adopted: August 13, 2026 Released: August 14, 2026 Docket: GN Docket No. 25-223 Commission: Chairman Brendan Carr and Commissioner Olivia Trusty issued separate statements supporting the report; Commissioner Anna Gomez concurred and issued a separate statement.

Overall determination

The Commission stresses that this does not mean every American already has adequate broadband. Approximately 10.58 million people still lacked access to terrestrial fixed broadband at the FCC’s 100/20 Mbps benchmark in June 2025. More than nine million of them lived in rural areas, while approximately 500,000 lived on Tribal lands.

Instead, the majority interprets Section 706 as asking whether deployment is progressing at a reasonable rate. It rejects the argument that the statute requires universal availability before the FCC can make a positive finding.

We look at major media news with Jessica González, co-CEO of the advocacy organization Free Press. She discusses the landmark lawsuit against Meta for making its social media platforms addictive for young people, efforts to halt the Paramount-Warner Bros. megamerger, and Disney’s lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission over what it calls the Trump administration’s “retaliatory campaign” against the ABC television network.

González says President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian takeover attempt of our media system” must be opposed.

Proton’s CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI?

In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology. It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone’s data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever.

Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He’s the founder and CEO of Proton, one of the world’s most popular encryption-focused tech companies. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product—whether people want it or not—is driving new users in droves to Proton’s products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet.

The size of a Starlink Direct-to-Cell beam can be measured in the real world using the phones that actually observed one. To our knowledge, this is the first real-world measurement of a Starlink D2C beam footprint at global scale (instead of an estimate modelled from regulatory filings).

When two phones in our background signal scans report the same decoded satellite ID and beam index at the same time (i.e., decoded from the broadcast LTE cell identity, which embeds the satellite ID and a trailing beam index), we treat them as being inside the same D2C beam. We independently verify each satellite assignment against archived orbital data (via Space-Track) at the time of observation. Thousands of these matches across thirteen markets let us measure the beam footprint directly.

As a robustness check, scrambling the beam indices (within the same satellite and 10 min window, preserving timing/geography) increases the median separation between matched phones from under 1 km to about 192 km.