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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.
The Valley forgets to factor in that everything in this universe has its limits. At Technology Review, senior editor Will Douglas Heaven offers a corrective to the continuous yelp in legacy media that AGI — machines that think like people — is just around the corner: "For many, AGI is more than just a technology. In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, it’s talked about in mystical terms. Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, is said to have led chants of “Feel the AGI!” at team meetings. And he feels it more than most: In 2024, he left OpenAI, whose stated mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, to cofound Safe Superintelligence, a startup dedicated to figuring out how to avoid a so-called rogue AGI (or control it when it comes). Superintelligence is the hot new flavor—AGI but better! —introduced as talk of AGI becomes commonplace." “How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time,” October 30, 2025 Mind Matters News readers who have followed the work of Gary Smith (here, for example) will certainly know better. But fame and fortune lie in spinning the tale that terrifies, not reporting the plain old facts. Heaven is blunt:
JERUSALEM, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Requests to relocate abroad by Israelis working at multinational companies operating in Israel rose in the past year in reaction to Israel's two-year war against Palestinian militant group Hamas, a report showed on Sunday. The Israel Advanced Technology Industries Association (IATI) found that 53% of companies reported an increase in relocation requests from Israeli employees, noting this was "a trend that may, over time, harm the local innovation engine and Israel's technological leadership." The tech sector accounts for about 20% of Israel's GDP, 15% of its jobs and more than half of its exports. The hundreds of multinationals in Israel include Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta and Apple.
The law follows mounting evidence linking heavy social media use to youth mental health risks and growing pressure on platforms to act. The state of New York has passed new legislation requiring social media platforms like X and TikTok to add warning labels to their services. Much like the warnings found on cigarette packaging, the new law — signed by Governor Kathy Hochul — targets platforms that rely on features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, and algorithmic feeds. These services will now be required to display labels cautioning users, particularly young people, about the potential mental health risks associated with prolonged use.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s description of the company’s quarterly earnings in August 2025 as “once in a generation” wasn’t far-fetched. It surpassed US$1
Satellite direct-to-cellphone (D2C) connectivity now is part of the discussion on how best to serve people where the terrestrial network does not reach. To connect to cell phones used by a particular mobile network operator subscriber, the low Earth orbit satellite operator must use spectrum owned by that MNO for downlinks and uplinks between the satellite and the subscriber’s cell phone. Consequently, satellite operators have partnered with different MNOs in different countries using the MNO’s spectrum. To wit, SpaceX’s Starlink has deals with T-Mobile (U.S.), Roger Communications (Canada), Optus and Telstra (Australia), KDDI (Japan) and VMO2 (U.K.). Similarly, AST SpaceMobile has partnered with AT&T and Verizon (U.S.), Vodafone (Europe/Africa), Rakuten Mobile (Japan) and stc (Saudi Arabia). But a curve was thrown at this cogent arrangement. SpaceX bought AWS-4 and H-block licenses from EchoStar, as Inside Towers reported. Now Starlink owns, and has exclusive use of, spectrum to connect directly cell phones that are programmed for those frequencies. Such a development means Starlink could bypass MNO networks altogether. Fueling more speculation, SpaceX filed a trademark application for the ‘Starlink Mobile’ name, Inside Towers reported. This scenario begs the question: Will satellites replace cell towers? Not according to AT&T.
FORT HALL (KFF Health News) — Standing atop Ferry Butte, Frances Goli scanned the more than half a million acres of Shoshone-Bannock tribal land below as she dug her hands into the pockets of a pink pullover. The April wind was chilly at one of the tribes’ highest vistas in remote southeastern Idaho. “Our goal is to bring fiber out here,” Goli said, sweeping one hand across the horizon. The landscape below is scattered with homes, bordered in the east by snowcapped mountain peaks and to the west by “The Bottoms,” where tribal bison graze along the Snake River. In between, on any given day, a cancer patient drives to the reservation’s casino to call doctors. A young mother asks one child not to play video games so another can do homework. Tribal field nurses update charts in paper notebooks at patients’ homes, then drive back to the clinic to pull up records, send orders, or check prescriptions. Three years ago, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes were awarded more than $22 million during the first round of the federal Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program. But tribes that were awarded millions in a second round of funding saw their payments held up under the Trump administration.
David Ellison had counted on the Trump family’s support. Now, they’re out of the deal and out of his corner. In back-to-back salvos Tuesday, the President and his family distanced themselves from Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery — a rebuke to owner David Ellison’s attempt to leverage relationships with the White House to close the $108 billion takeover effort. President Trump Tuesday afternoon said he had been “treated [...] far worse” by the Ellison-owned CBS since the family closed on a deal for CBS parent Paramount. “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!” Less than two hours after that message, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners said it was backing out of the Paramount-led bidding consortium, which also includes three Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Apollo.
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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.
In 2008, Time magazine named 23andMe’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing service as “Invention of the Year.” With just a cheek swab, anyone could access their genetic code to uncover their genetic predispositions and ancestry. Throughout its tenure, 23andMe provided genetic testing services to more than 15 million customers worldwide and amassed a vast trove of genomic data. In March of this year, after years of failing to turn a profit, the company declared bankruptcy. The fate of millions of people’s highly sensitive genomic data soon became uncertain. The collapse of 23andMe is more than a business story about a failing biotechnology company — it is a reckoning for how the US government regulates the most intimate form of personal data: DNA.
China's cyber regulator on Saturday issued draft rules for public comment that would tighten oversight of artificial intelligence services designed to simulate human personalities and engage users in emotional interaction. The move underscores Beijing's effort to shape the rapid rollout of consumer-facing AI by strengthening safety and ethical requirements.
PC Magazine covered the FCC Senate Oversight Committee hearing where, after verbal exchanges, Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) asked FCC Chair Brendan Carr: “Please, yes or no, is the FCC an independent agency?” PC Mag continued “the senator pointed to the commission’s “About the FCC” page, which described it as “An independent US government agency overseen by Congress.” Sen. Luján interjected: “It just simply says, man, the FCC’s independent,” asking moments later: “Is your website lying?” “Carr: “Possibly.” Carr reiterated that “the FCC is not an independent agency, formally speaking.” “Sen. Luján concluded by saying, “If this is lying, then you should just fix it,” and had a printout of the FCC page entered into the hearing record.” The article does mention that the language — that the FCC is an independent Agency — — has been around for at least a decade. Note that reporter Sara Fischer at Axios tweeted that during the course of the hearing the word ‘independent’ was removed from the ‘about’ page.
After making millions with PayPal, Peter Thiel launched a startup focused on counterterrorism and tapped his friend Alex Karp to run it. In an exclusive excerpt from his new biography of Karp, Michael Steinberger details its earliest work for spies and police.
To what extent is Starlink's rapid growth making Capitol Hill lawmakers think about whether the $8.5 billion Universal Service Fund and the $42.45 billion BEAD program are becoming obsolete?
A key Republican senator Friday joined the mounting opposition in Washington to Netflix’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Sen. Tim Scott (R, S.C), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and a close White House ally, said the deal raises “significant antitrust problems” and could hurt “moviegoers, on-camera talent, writers, producers, and everyone who loves the entertainment industry.” In a letter to the Trump administration’s antitrust regulators, Scott said the $83 billion merger risks hurting consumers by entrenching Netflix, which “seems to have the power to increase prices regularly,” as the dominant streaming app. It would also leave Hollywood showrunners with fewer buyers and “create a crisis for brick-and-mortar movie theatres,” Scott wrote. That echoes concerns by Hollywood groups including the screenwriters’ guild and TV unions. “The transaction warrants rigorous antitrust review under all applicable antitrust merger and monopolization laws and, to the extent appropriate, a lawsuit to block it,” Scott wrote in the letter, which was sent to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission and reviewed by Semafor.
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Scoop.it!
