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By treating IT and AI as neutral tools, we obscure our ability to see—and resist—power. If just one of the big three tech giants collapses, societal mayhem could follow.
A bill filed late last month would claw back $21 billion allocated to state governments to address the digital divide, marking another moment in the debate over expanding broadband internet access in rural America. A draft version of the bill, sponsored by Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, would limit the scope of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. BEAD, created as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act under the Biden administration, is a $42.45 billion federal grant program aimed at connecting every American to high-speed internet. Of that $42.45 billion, about $21 billion is slotted for so-called nondeployment funds — essentially, anything other than infrastructure to expand internet access. Those other projects could include funding for permitting, telehealth, cybersecurity, preparedness for artificial intelligence, and more. Ernst’s bill would claw back those nondeployment dollars, angering critics and lawmakers across multiple states.
2025 was a transformative year for the submarine cable industry, characterized by unprecedented private investment and AI-driven infrastructure demands. The world's largest hyperscalers remain the largest investors in new submarine cable systems in 2025 as they race to ensure they have the essential infrastructure in place to support their growing networks of data centers and cloud regions. Google Cloud announced in late November its plan to construct TalayLink, a new subsea cable connecting Australia and Thailand. The cable will create a new, diverse route to Thailand via the Indian Ocean, west of the Sunda Strait. Many existing subsea cables currently pass through this area. Google Cloud also announced plans for new connectivity hubs in Mandurah, Western Australia, and southern Thailand.
Light Reading's D2D market coverage this year spotlights progression from testing to launches, and competitive dynamics among global satellite partners. Direct-to-device satellite connectivity shifted from promise to product in 2025, as T-Mobile launched the first commercial D2D messaging service in the US and operators worldwide scrambled to match the capability that suddenly went from a luxury to a critical competitive advantage.
BISMARCK, N.D. – North Dakota Information Technology (NDIT) recently announced that a key federal agency has approved the state’s final Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) plan—an essential milestone that allows the state to move forward with awarding grants under streamlined, lower-cost rules. According to a press release from North Dakota Public Information Officer Jeremy Fettig, the approval from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is especially significant for a state already recognized for its strong broadband infrastructure. Decades of strategic investment in high-quality fiber have positioned North Dakota to become the first state in the U.S. where every home and business can access high-speed fiber.
The FCC reports on Chairman Brendan Carr summary of the FCC’s key wins in 2025... “2025 was a historic year for the FCC and I am proud of all the wins we were able to achieve for the American people,” Chairman Carr stated. “I want to express my thanks and appreciation to the agency’s talented staff for the great and efficient results that they delivered all year long. But this is just the beginning. The FCC is firing on all cylinders, and we will build on this momentum to deliver even more wins in 2026.”
Abstract We examine the evolving political economy of the U.S. wireless communications market through a case study of the 2020T-Mobile/Sprint merger. Drawing on industry data from the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project and policy documents from the merger review, we show how the merging parties and regulators worked to construct the perception of competition to justify the transaction's approval despite clear evidence of oligopolistic concentration. We conceptualize this strategy as performative competition, involving regulators downplaying antitrust concerns, reframing consumer harms, and emphasizing speculative promises of 5G deployment to approve a corporate merger. We argue that performative competition is an increasingly necessary regulatory strategy, which emerges from policymakers’ neoliberal deference to dominant industry actors in a political economy marked by the growing consolidation of wireless markets; entails an increasing decoupling of communications policymaking from regulatory empirical analysis; and fulfills a discursive policy function of legitimating policy decisions to policy stakeholders.
MinneapoliMedia is a new media source in Coon Rapids MN. It features local folks and tells their stories. A recent article caught my eye because it started with an image that will be familiar to many readers and it’s a story that folks who have good broadband think is in the past, a farmer without adequate broadband… "Naima Dhore apologizes for the delay. She is in rural Minnesota, where broadband thins the farther you move from city limits, where the land opens wide but infrastructure does not always follow. She explains that she needs to stay still so the connection does not drop. It is an unintentional metaphor for the work itself."
In a year defined by sweeping changes in public media — from the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to the increasing fragility of local news — NFCB is proud to announce a new policy partnership with Free Press, one of the nation’s leading organizations advancing equitable media policy, protecting press freedom, and strengthening community-centered civic information systems. To be clear: Free Press is not affiliated with “The Free Press,” the for-profit media outlet founded by Bari Weiss. These are two entirely separate entities with no overlap in mission, ideology, or structure. NFCB’s partnership is with Free Press and Free Press Action, the long-standing nonprofit organizations engaged in media justice, journalism policy, and movement-building.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23, 2025 – Major broadband industry groups are continuing their push for the Federal Communications Commission to preempt state and local permitting rules for wireline infrastructure deployments.
President Donald Trump spent most of 2025 hacking away at large parts of the federal government. His administration fired, bought out, or otherwise ousted hundreds of thousands of federal employees. Entire agencies were gutted. By so many metrics, this year in politics has been defined more by what has been cut away than by what’s been added on. One tiny corner of regulation, however, has actually grown under Trump: the critical minerals list. Most people likely hadn’t heard of “critical minerals” until early this year when the president repeatedly inserted the phrase into his statements, turning the once obscure policy realm into a household phrase. Trump took unusual steps in 2025 to strengthen American control over a supply chain crucial to many industries — and to the clean energy transition.
The NYFed has quietly injected tens of billions into major banks—now with no limit. Unreported policy changes raise fears of another Wall Street bailout. Ominous signs that at least one of America’s “Too Big to Fail” banks is yet again seriously short of cash emerged this weekend in documents examined by James Henry, DCReport’s economics correspondent. For the past two months the Federal Reserve has been silently injecting tens of billions of dollars of cash into banks. No one announced this. Henry found the evidence in public records that few, if any, Wall Street journalists consult, but that we routinely review at DCReport.
For many today, artificial general intelligence — AGI — is no longer just a speculative technology. In certain corners of Silicon Valley and the global AI research community, it has taken on the weight of a prophecy. Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, was famously said to have led team meetings with the chant: “Feel the AGI!” The phrase captures the mood of a whole subculture: AGI is not merely being built; it is being invoked. In 2024, Sutskever left OpenAI — whose official mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity — to co-found Safe Superintelligence, a company dedicated to making sure that whatever emerges does not “go rogue”. Superintelligence is the hot new flavour: AGI, but more powerful, more autonomous, more dangerous… and more mystical.
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Ever since a spate of mergers in the 1990s, Westlaw and LexisNexis have dominated legal research. And that might be why searching legal cases is so costly, even in the age of AI.
Dec 30, 2025 The Cape Cod Commission is a pre-qualified planning service provider through the Massachusetts Broadband Institute's (MBI) Municipal Digital Equity Planning Program for the 15 towns of Barnstable County. Through this program, the Commission assisted the towns of Bourne, Sandwich, Orleans, Falmouth, and Barnstable in developing municipal digital equity plans, roadmaps for ensuring that all residents have access to the devices, connectivity, and skills needed to participate fully in today's digital society.
The past year has seen a steady drip of news related to quantum, with telcos increasingly thinking about improving the security of their networks. The passing year certainly did its best to live up to its designation by the UN as the international year of quantum science and technology, at least in the world of telecom. Even if commercial quantum computers are still years away, the industry is already grappling with what their arrival will bring. A big concern is shoring up defenses against quantum computing's expected implications for cybersecurity. The technology is broadly expected to crack common encryption algorithms, which are underpinned by mathematical equations that are for all practical purposes impenetrable for classical computers but vulnerable to quantum ones.
The Trump administration brought the sledgehammer down on clean energy — but that still wasn't enough to crush it. Five and a half months. That’s all the time Donald Trump needed to crush the only major climate law the United States ever managed to pass. It was swift work, using a sledgehammer and not a scalpel, and now the energy transition will have to make do with the fragments of the law that remain. The words bleak and dispiriting come to mind. How else to describe the fact that the U.S. entered the year implementing an ambitious if inadequate decarbonization law, and is now exiting 2025 with that law all but repealed? But there were also some reasons to be hopeful about the energy transition this year — if you knew where to look. Let’s start with the numbers.
For the past few years, Light Reading has been exploring the digital divide in our podcast, The Divide, where we talk to guests about why and where digital inequity still exists, and what's being done to get high-speed Internet to everyone, everywhere. While broadband providers and trade associations in the US continue to celebrate the ongoing deployment of broadband infrastructure across the country – and while those builds are indeed in progress (as you'll note if you read our weekly column, The Buildout) – the fact remains that the digital divide persists. That divide comprises three distinct issues: broadband access, affordability and adoption.
It was a year of tough questions about how to stop the AI boom from spiking household electricity bills and derailing the clean energy transition. Those in the energy sector, like everyone else, could not stop talking about artificial intelligence this year. It seemed as if every week brought a new, higher forecast of just how much electricity the data centers that run AI models will need. Amid the deluge of discussion, an urgent question arose again and again: How can we prevent the computing boom from hurting consumers and the planet? We’re not bidding 2025 farewell with a concrete answer, but we’re certainly closer to one than we were when the year started. To catch you up: Tech giants are constructing a fleet of energy-gobbling data centers in a bid to expand AI and other computing tools.
We’re near the end of the year, and Congress is recessed until the new year. That hasn’t stopped Congress from introducing interesting new bills related to broadband. Any bill introduced in the first year of Congress is not automatically carried over to the second year session, but I assume these new bills are meant for deliberation in 2026.
Last week I posted the annual MN County Broadband Profiles. They are an opportunity for folks to see what’s happening in their community, what they can expect in terms of broadband and where they might need help. Someone asked me about how they could best use them. So, I came up with some ideas to…
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17, 2025 – An inquiry into how to accelerate wireline broadband deployments from the Federal Communications Commission has drawn sharply diverging responses from cities, electric cooperatives, and broadband industry groups. Cities like Austin, Texas, have blasted the effort as “a solution in search of a problem".
This year in energy has been an absolute blur. We started with President Donald Trump’s declaration of a federal energy emergency, saw the gutting of clean-energy tax credits, and finished with an Election Day where affordability took center stage. Now, with 2025 almost behind us, let’s rewind and revisit the 10 stories that defined this year. Trump declares an energy emergency On his first day in office, Trump set course for a total revamp of the American energy landscape. Step one: Citing rising power demand to declare a national emergency on energy, all while freezing funds for clean energy programs. Trump proceeded to use that “emergency” to prop up fossil fuels — more on that below.
As American families face an affordability crisis, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ranking Member of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, led her Democratic committee colleagues in demanding to know why Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr is failing to address the crisis at an FCC oversight hearing that also included Commissioners Olivia Trusty and Anna Gomez. Sen. Cantwell made clear that the FCC is enabling continued industry consolidation that will only lead to less competition, creating higher prices and fewer choices for consumers across a range of services. “The question is, what is the Chairman of the FCC -- and the FCC -- doing to bring down costs for consumers?” said Sen. Cantwell. “The American people deserve an FCC that protects them from hidden fees and promotes affordability. The FCC, though, is, in my mind, doing just the opposite in allowing consolidations that reduces competition and can help drive up costs. Americans are paying more than ever for streaming, cable, and wireless services.”
Several industry news outlets are reporting on a recent survey from Parks Associated that shows that 19% of homes with broadband have a professionally monitored security system, and another 7% pay for partial security services like video storage monitoring alerts. A few other interesting statistics related to home security are: 33% of broadband subscribers have a smart camera of some sort. Roughly 78% of homes that own a security system pay for an external service, such as professional monitoring, self-monitoring, or video storage. The Parks research shows that the average fee for home security services in $54 per month.
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