Broadband Breakfast hosted its America250 / Telecom150 event online on Oct. 1. The event marked 250 years of American independence and 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell received his telephone patent in 1876. Its two panels traced the policy choices that shaped American communications: who could develop technologies, bring them to market and compete with established firms.
American technological leadership has depended on early public financing of research & development, industrial policy, and regulatory intervention. But it, imperatively, has also depended on what the government chose to leave unregulated: technologies entrepreneurs could build on, markets they could enter and services they could launch with fewer administrative barriers.
Laws protecting competition, enforced through antitrust actions, opened discoveries held by dominant firms to other inventors.
Open protocols, the shared technical standards of the internet, let entrepreneurs distribute services without a network owner’s permission. In 1996, Congress added Section 230 to the Communications Act, limiting online platforms’ liability for what their users posted and reducing the legal risks of building services around those contributions.
Those policies addressed distinct problems, with effects extending beyond their original aims. The panels examined how intervention and restraint shaped market entry. They also examined whether telephone-era access rules offer useful precedents for digital platforms and AI.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr announced a set of proposals Wednesday intended to expand wireless connectivity across terrestrial networks, satellite systems, and commercial drones.
The three proposals, scheduled for a vote at the agency’s Oct. 29 meeting, outline plans to auction 25 megahertz of mid-band spectrum, update direct-to-device rules to eliminate cellular dead zones, and lift restrictions preventing drone operations in the 800 MHz band. The announcement follows a decision by the FCC Space Bureau authorizing SpaceX to operate a 15,000-satellite direct-to-cell system.
As the development of artificial intelligence accelerates, more voices inside and outside the industry are warning that the technology poses major risks to humanity. The new film, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, features interviews with leading AI executives, researchers, as well as critics, who all voice similar concerns. Since the film’s release earlier this year, a number of AI-driven hacks and other incidents have further alarmed people studying this topic.
“I’m really scared, and I’m struggling in my own life to sort of compartmentalize what I learned, what I know, what I understand, what I see happening around me,” says filmmaker Daniel Roher. He began work on The AI Doc as he was about to become a father and wondered what kind of world his children would inherit.
We also speak with Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, a leading AI safety advocate who is featured in the film. He says part of the risk of AI development is that it has the logic of an “arms race,” with companies and countries racing to gain supremacy rather than building guardrails.
“The race changes as soon as the fear of all of us losing becomes bigger than the fear of me losing to you,” he says.
These discussions may have only recently broken through to the mainstream public and to policymakers, but they’ve been going on in AI circles in the San Francisco Bay Area for years, and they’ve been gaining intensity. I went to put my ear to the ground at a gathering in San Francisco to discuss these issues.
An event listing for a picnic beckoned people in the AI scene to spend a Sunday afternoon talking about recent calls to slow down the technology.
It was one of those postcard-perfect days at the 5-acre China Basin park on the San Francisco Bay, overlooking a Giants-Dodgers game at the ballpark.
Dony Christie, a community organizer in the AI safety scene, chose this spot not for the scenery but because it’s between the offices of Anthropic and OpenAI.
“The hope is, why can't people at the labs just meet at a park in between them and work out a deal?” he said. “I have been concerned about existential risks for a long time. Just like, what do I do to save the world?”
Worries around artificial intelligence cross party lines, with the vast majority of Americans saying the U.S. government should prioritize keeping AI under human control and protecting workers.
A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that most Americans, 64%, think AI is developing “too fast,” while 27% say its development has been “about right” and only 8% say it’s moving “too slow.”
SpaceX just won approval to grow its direct-to-device fleet more than 23x, from roughly 650 satellites today to 15,000 by 2035, with peak speeds targeting 150 Mbps.
I finally caught up with Virginia for a profile the other day, a state commonwealth that’s been the center of the BEAD drama and a leader in broadband deployment. Newly minted Virginia Broadband Director Chandler Vaughan took some time last week to catch me up.
My experience with Chandler is that he is always upbeat and enthusiastic. He credits the fact that he isn’t in a stale, ‘white bread government job.’ He tells me he thrives in the job because it is ‘entrepreneurial and fast paced.’ “We’re not just another administrator; we can actually see the work happening in communities.
WASHINGTON, Oct 7 (Reuters) - The Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday it will vote on October 29 to bar all Chinese labs from testing electronic devices such as smartphones, cameras and computers for use in the US, widening a previous action targeting Beijing.
The FCC said it will prohibit test labs and certification bodies in countries including China that deny reciprocal treatment to US-based test labs.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in 2025, 82% of electronics were tested in China, which does not have an agreement with the US.
In my opinion, the BEAD grant program has been a rolling disaster since it was introduced. We saw how a good grant program works when the Capital Project Fund program operated by Treasury quickly dispersed infrastructure money and put it to use. Both programs were authorized around the same time, yet most of the projects funded by CPF are completed, or will be soon since a few projects got an extension until next June.
By contrast, BEAD construction has barely started. There are numerous reasons for BEAD delays, with the most recent delay when NTIA lost a year when it switched to the Benefit of the Bargain rules that drastically halved the funding awarded for infrastructure.
Verizon is quietly scaling back a perk it includes in its wireless and internet plans as it works to retain price-conscious customers.
The carrier has been struggling with customer retention in recent years amid several price increases.
On an earnings call in January, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said that the company lost roughly 2.25 million wireless customers over the past three years, citing price hikes without added value, friction in the customer experience, price perception and elevated competition as the top four reasons behind the losses.
The dangerous experiments AI companies engaged in over the summer opened a new dimension of needed AI regulation — legal measures to ensure the safety of the AI development process itself. AI companies conducted improperly designed AI experiments that led to cyberattacks against firms such as Hugging Face and government websites in Australia and the US. More such incidents are being disclosed — one report says the companies are investigating tens of thousands of incidents where their AI experiments went wrong.
The new public policy problem is that these incidents took place during AI research, development and testing. The AI models involved had not been released to the public. The problem was not that the models were made available without adequate safeguards and had gone wrong in commercial use. The problem was that the AI development, testing and evaluation procedures were dangerously inadequate to prevent foreseeable harm before any third-party had access to the model itself. As Amos Toh, senior counsel and manager of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice writes, policymakers have to focus on AI safeguards addressing “not only public releases but also risky uses of advanced models behind closed doors.”
We speak to the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind the global buildup of artificial intelligence.
"Instead of discussing faulty, unreliable systems," Gebru says tech leaders like SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei are "marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent," and lobbying for "self-policing and self-regulation" to avoid being held "liable through existing laws."
Gebru expresses skepticism over increasingly widespread claims that AI algorithms pose an existential risk to humanity, warning that such claims are overblown and that "what is actually happening is regulatory capture."
Andy Burnham, the nascent United Kingdom prime minister, has in recent weeks sought to position the UK as a global leader in AI safety. At his first party conference as Labour leader, Burnham said that he will use the UK’s G20 Presidency next year to put AI “center stage,” followed by the development of a “new global code to capture its benefits whilst being clear-eyed about its risks.”
Also attending the Labour Party conference last month — his first as a member of the Cabinet — AI Minister Kanishka Narayan made the somewhat surprising pronouncement that the UK has already effectively banned superintelligence. This would be a world first, given that no country currently has superintelligence-specific laws (though proposals have been put forward in the UK, EU and the United States).
Narayan explained that the UK does not have the physical infrastructure, such as energy or data center capabilities, “to build superintelligence in this country,” and besides, copyright laws make it illegal. “...It is currently illegal to develop a frontier large language model based on the transformer architecture, given the copyright position that we have,” he told the Politico Pub. Therefore, he argued, he is not going to “do a bill for the sake of doing a bill.”
AT&T says the initiative will help support their plan to reach more than 60 million fiber locations by the end of 2030.
Three entities — AT&T, Global Infrastructure Partners, and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board — have agreed to form a U.S. fiber joint venture that aims to accelerate the expansion of fiber internet across America, the companies announced Tuesday.
The joint venture will combine Forged Fiber 37 — a newly created AT&T subsidiary holding network assets, operations, and the fiber build engine recently acquired from Lumen — with Gigapower, which is AT&T’s existing wholesale fiber joint venture with Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP). The new entity will operate as a commercial open access wholesale fiber company, according to AT&T, which will hold a 50% ownership stake in the joint venture.
News Network and response teams from Verizon have mobilized to the Gulf Coast ahead of Hurricane Isaias. Here’s how else they’re preparing. By Brad Randall, Broadband Communities Verizon is now offering unlimited domestic calling, texting, and data for customers in the path of Hurricane Isaias. The offer will extend from October 9 through October 15, Verizon says, with relief efforts covering counties in the hurricane’s track across Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi.
Verizon also says they’re ready to respond with mobile and satellite assets, portable generators, and hands-on support before, during, and after the storm.
Hurricane Isaias promises to disrupt an otherwise quiet hurricane season in the Atlantic, threatening landfall along the Florida Panhandle.
/PRNewswire/ -- Grain Management, LLC ("Grain"), a leading global investment firm specializing in digital infrastructure, today announced a definitive agreement under which SpaceX will acquire 100% of Grain's nationwide 800 MHz spectrum portfolio. The transaction is subject to FCC approval and other customary closing conditions.
The agreement utilizes scarce low-band spectrum to support next-generation satellite direct-to-device ("D2D") services, enabling Starlink Mobile to reach customers from both the ground and space. As Grain approaches its twentieth anniversary, the transaction demonstrates the firm's ability to bring specialized capabilities, capital, and execution to opportunities that can reshape communications at national scale.
A sizable chunk of California’s Democratic establishment, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, greased the skids for the father-son duo of Larry and David Ellison to gain control of a commanding share of America’s culture and news industries.
Lawmakers are considering forcing data centers to shoulder new costs and restrictions while speeding up the energy infrastructure needed to power the AI boom.
Why it matters: The bipartisan legislation, unveiled last week, represents the most aggressive response yet from Washington to data centers amid growing backlash over their energy and environmental impacts.
Driving the news: The provisions are part of broader Senate legislation aimed at speeding up permitting for energy — but make no mistake: The data center measures are significant and would go far beyond Washington's largely voluntary efforts to date.
A conversation with social entrepreneur Sascha Meinrath about privacy breaches and censorship disguised as AI safeguards, and what can be done about it.
Hanae Baruchel: You saw the impact of AI on society coming earlier than most. What did those early days look like?
Sascha Meinrath: I started working on AI in 2009, way before it was on most people’s radar — as part of the Open Technology Institute, which I founded. We spent a lot of time working with decision-makers in DC, trying to get them to proactively prepare and ensure consumer privacy. We also spun up the Open Technology Fund, which is now the largest open-source circumvention-technology funder in the United States. I thought I’d gotten away from AI, but I’m right back in it – building a global team of circumvention technologists, researchers and developers at the Center for Agentic AI Research.
Baruchel: You say AI models are “snitches.” What do you mean?
Meinrath: The AI models are snitches to their corporate owners — and they’re also surveilling and exfiltrating an unknown array of information from users and providing it directly to the intelligence community.
A US plan to bar Chinese laboratories from testing electronic devices for the American market could disrupt a key link in the global electronics supply chain, potentially forcing manufacturers to move testing operations overseas and raising costs for an industry heavily reliant on China's manufacturing and testing capabilities, Chinese analysts said on Thursday.
ChatGPT’s teen safeguards are meant to protect vulnerable users, but new testing found the chatbot continues encouraging engagement during crises and potentially encourages unhealthy relationships with the AI itself.
U.S. Department of Agriculture Under Secretary for Rural Development Glen R. Smith announced today that Rural Development invested nearly $25 billion in loans and grants in fiscal year 2026. These investments are helping rural communities grow and maintain critical services that families, farmers, and businesses rely on every day.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, USDA is delivering the infrastructure and resources rural America needs to compete, grow, and prosper,” said Under Secretary Smith. “Consistent with the President’s executive orders to cut red tape, unleash American energy, and put rural communities first, Rural Development is investing in the infrastructure that keeps our communities strong, our farmers competitive, and our small towns thriving for generations to come.”
On Tuesday Google launched a new site that lets anyone verify whether a piece of media, be it an image, a video, or an audio clip, is generated using AI.
Congress must ultimately regulate AI. Until it does, state attorneys general can call the industry’s bluff.
Take the CEOs of our leading artificial intelligence companies attheirword, and they all believe that a combination of guardrails and speed bumps is necessary to make sure their products don’t do vast damage. What stands in the way, in their telling, is a coordination problem: unilateral action by one company will have little impact — beyond putting that company at a disadvantage — if its competitors do not follow suit.
As a general matter, I think very little that any of these guys say should be treated with credulity, but there is a basic logic to this.
The correct and obvious answer is aggressive federal regulation (without preemption of state laws), and there are a number of seriouslegislativeefforts already under way to tackle different regulatory issues in different ways. But we may well face the moment of gravest danger in AI’s development in a matter of months, not years, and many experts’ p(doom) exceeds my own p(Congress and this president agreeing quickly on AI regulation with real teeth). And so, Big AI hurtles on, risks to civilization notwithstanding.
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