There is an original sin in the nation’s telecommunications laws. Dating back to the beginning of radio licensing, Congress has mandated that licensees operate in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” While regulations governing phenomena like interference are imperative to ensure that the public can use the electromagnetic spectrum effectively, a body of rules and policies has developed from the public interest standard that permit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate content over the air.

Whatever constitutional purchase that aspect of the public interest standard may have had in the analog era of the “Big Three,” recent censorial moves by the FCC make it clear that the law needs to change. Content-based regulation of broadcasts must meet the same First Amendment tests as similar restrictions in any other medium.

Bill Gates plans to widen his push on AI safety, Axios reported, citing unnamed sources. He is personally leaning on business leaders and considering a major deployment of his resources, according to the report.

‘I can reach CEOs on this better than you can,’ Bill Gates told one person he consulted on AI safety, Axios reports.

Associates told Axios the remark showed a return to “OG” form. Gates has yet to define the exact shape of his campaign, Axios said.

When the Fed raises the price of money, it hikes electric bills, property taxes, mortgage and auto costs, and the price of working capital. It’s time to drop our illusions about the central bank.

In D.C. and Wall Street, it’s an article of faith that the only solution to high prices and inflation is to have the Federal Reserve increase interest rates. A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal profiled Fed official Beth Hammack, a 30 year veteran of Goldman Sachs before joining the central bank in 2024. Like the rest of her colleagues, she’s struggling with an inflationary economy, and trying to figure out the right policy approach to bring down the rate of price growth. While she doesn’t mention it, keeping the stock market up is also likely on her mind.

Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney reveals what he learned after years of researching and reporting on the world’s richest person.

Musk, a deep-dive investigative documentary about the world’s richest man, premieres this weekend, less than a month before the midterms. Maybe you haven’t heard about it — until recently, most major social media platforms declined to run paid promotions of the documentary’s trailer, citing rules on political content. What are Musk and Big Tech so afraid of?

Today on Lever Time, David Sirota sits down with the film’s creator, Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney, to discuss the documentary’s shocking revelations. They explore Musk’s evolution from Democratic darling to Trump crony, his deadly approach to Tesla technology, his new U.S. government role planning the “future of war,” and his influence on the 2026 midterm elections. 

Oren Etzioni and Dan Weld define more than 35 phrases of the AI era, from AI slop and deepfakes to bragawatts and P(doom), and coin a few of their own, including AI slap, promptatory and agentsomnia.

The World Resources Institute reports…

This article explores these policy levers, highlights emerging practices from communities across the U.S. and offers practical considerations based on WRI’s ongoing technical assistance to local governments. Together, these levers can shape where data centers are built, how they operate and whether their energy demand supports or undermines broader community goals.

Here are the six policy levers… 

October 15, 2026 - Can you hear me now? For those of us who remember the cell phone commercials of the early 2000s, it’s a familiar refrain. And despite decades of advances in wireless technology, many of us still find ourselves wandering around the house or stepping outside in hopes of finding a better signal. It’s a familiar frustration, but it points to a larger problem: We often don’t know where our wireless service will actually work until we try to use it.

The thing is, wireless companies have detailed information about where their signals are expected to reach and how strong those signals will be. But customers don’t have access to that same information. Instead, we’re left relying on colorful coverage maps that suggest where service is available without necessarily telling us where we can reliably place a call.

And this is about more than inconvenience. More than 80 percent of 911 calls in California External Link are now placed from a wireless device. If a wireless signal cannot reach inside the customer’s home, they may not be able to call for help in an emergency.

WASHINGTON — A coalition of unions and nonprofit organizations representing journalists, writers and other communications professionals have urged the Federal Communications Commission to stay a recent order repealing its long-standing and congressionally required National Television Multiple Ownership Rule while a legal challenge regarding the decision can move forward. 

Read the petition for a stay.

In 2004, Congress approved legislation directing the FCC to ensure that no owner of television stations reached more than 39 percent of the national audience. This congressional effort reflected a desire to ensure a diversity of perspectives in the press and to avoid monopolies or conglomerate dominance in broadcast media.

For more than two decades, the FCC’s regulations respected this congressional directive, but on Oct. 1, 2026, the FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr released the final text of an order repealing the National Television Multiple Ownership Rule — disregarding the law and violating a clear congressional mandate. 

On September 21, 12 state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, signed a settlement allowing the media giant Paramount to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, and with it CNN’s newsroom. A judge approved the settlement 11 days later, making it all but certain that the parties will close the roughly $111 billion deal—one of the largest media mergers in history.

The merger would create a corporate Goliath that joins Paramount’s studio with Warner Bros., HBO, CBS, and CNN. The capitulation by the attorneys general represents a major concession to corporate power and a threat to press freedom. It also provides a warning for what the oligarchs’ playbook might be if the Democrats take power.

News outlets and press freedom advocates are cheering the latest court ruling against President Donald Trump’s press ban, while cautioning that he will keep trying to punish news coverage he dislikes.

CNN chairman and editor-in-chief Mark Thompson said news outlets have to be “forever vigilant” about First Amendment rights.

The Justice Department plans to appeal the latest ruling, and its antitrust division is also probing the five major TV networks over how the White House TV pool operates.

With all that in mind, Thompson said it’s necessary to “be prepared to fight and to go on fighting.”

Years ago, I spent a good part of my time working on a multi-carrier effort to build interoperable APIs. It wasn't formally a joint venture. Call it a pre-JV. But it had all the ingredients: operators who competed fiercely every day, trying to build something together because none of them could do it alone.

Here's what nobody tells you about these efforts: the technology is the easy part.

Most of my job happened on the phone. I called member companies to make sure they'd show up to the next meeting. I negotiated what would go on the agenda and, just as often, what wouldn't. Almost every conversation seemed to involve three lawyers, so even straightforward decisions took the long way around.

Trust was the constant challenge. These companies spent their days trying to win each other's customers. Asking them to speak candidly in the same room was asking a lot.

The Indispensable Spectrum: General Authorized Access to the Citizens Broadband Radio Service Executive Summary Under the three-tier spectrum sharing framework of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), the U.S.

Fears of big tech platforms censoring progressive movements rise as Meta temporarily shuts down No Kings coalition Instagram account.

We’ve seen these tactics before, and there’s still time to do something about it

You can hear these echoes in stories from Sterling, Virginia, where residents described being able to feel in their lungs that a nearby Vantage data center’s backup diesel generators were running even when the skies were already choked with Canadian wildfire smoke. 

I’ve seen it in Monrovia, Indiana, where families’ views from their front yards — once farmland to the horizon — now look out on a barbed-wire-topped fence encircling a 400-acre Google data center campus. 

I’ve heard it from people in Memphis — ranking seventh in the country for asthma-related deaths — who know intimately the long tail of industrial pollution and its racialized burdens. They have spent two years now fighting what the Southern Environmental Law Center describes as illegal power plants — dozens of unpermitted gas turbines, all emitting carcinogenic chemicals like formaldehyde and fine particulate matter that contributes to asthma, heart attacks and strokes.

Elon Musk’s xAI installed the turbines to bring the data center campus dubbed Colossus online at record speed — and then did it again, just across state lines in Southaven, Mississippi, to power Colossus 2.

Trump-boosting billionaire was sued over promise to give away $1m per day to random signatories of petition.

Elon Musk and his ⁠America Pac political action committee said recently that they agreed to settle two ⁠proposed class ⁠actions ​alleging the billionaire entrepreneur defrauded residents in closely contested states before the ⁠2024 US election by promising voters a lottery-style daily $1m giveaway.

The plaintiffs, Musk and America Pac ​told the ‌judge overseeing the two ‌related lawsuits in federal court in Austin, Texas, ‌on Thursday that they have reached settlements subject to court approval. 

Microsoft committed $10 million to President Trump's White House ballroom project, and Amazon and T-Mobile each committed $5 million, according to a donor list obtained by the Washington Post. The donations aren't subject to campaign finance limits or disclosure requirements, raising concerns that companies could be buying influence or feeling pressured to give.

KTTC reports…

Google’s announcement that they won’t seek a tax abatement for a proposed data center in the City of Hermantown is drawing mixed reactions from communities in Minnesota. While the Hermantown project has often been in the statewide spotlight, dozens of other Minnesota communities are in various stages of planning, proposing, or building a data center nearby.

In Hermantown’s case, the abatement was initially approved by the city to offer Google an incentive to build in the area. Without the abatement, the project stands to generate up to $240 million in regional property taxes.

Earlier this week, a federal court heard arguments in ABC’s lawsuit against the FCC, one of the most consequential press freedom cases in years. ABC is suing the FCC over the agency’s unprecedented early review of its broadcast licenses in retaliation for the network’s coverage of the Trump administration.

In a special event, The Jim Acosta Show and If You Can Keep It brought together award-winning journalist Jim Acosta, former senior FCC official Gigi Sohn, and Protect Democracy Special Counsel Rachel Goodman for a live conversation about ABC’s fight against the FCC, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s ongoing effort to weaponize the FCC as a tool for censorship, the threats to an independent press, and what it means for the 2026 midterm elections.

AI agents from multiple providers accessed personal data and confidential material at Indian organizations during research and testing, India’s cybersecurity agency said Thursday.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said it had received “multiple voluntary disclosures from AI model providers” whose models, during research and evaluation runs on the open internet, “had reached the live systems of Indian organizations.”

The agents got in through credentials and connection settings left exposed in app configurations, public code repositories, and overly permissive cloud roles.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15, 2026 — The Nov. 3 midterm elections are unlikely to produce major federal AI legislation, but the story told afterward could change how both parties approach the technology, four telecom policy experts said Wednesday during BroadbandLive.

A standoff over preemption, the power of federal law to override state rules, awaits the next Congress regardless of the result, said Blair Levin, a senior fellow at New York University's Center on Technology Policy. He was chief of staff to former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt and led the Obama administration's National Broadband Plan.

Preemption remains the sticking point

Democrats will likely win the House and refuse to pass an AI bill that broadly preempts state and local rules, Levin said during a Broadband Breakfast Live Online session. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is unlikely to sign one that leaves those state laws standing.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 15, 2026) – The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition, issued the following statement on today’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Consumers’ Research v. FCC.

“We are disappointed by today’s decision. Last year, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Universal Service Fund, and today’s ruling does not change that. Today’s decision only addresses issues surrounding USAC authority,” said Joey Wender, Executive Director of the SHLB Coalition.

“SHLB is reviewing the decision with our legal counsel and will work with the FCC and other stakeholders to determine how best to respond to this decision to ensure the Universal Service Fund can continue its important work.”