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The FCC issued a Public Notice with the longest title I can remember: Wireline Competition Bureau Reminds Reverse-preemption States of Obligation to Effectively Regulate Pole Attachments and Seeks Comment on Need for Changes to the Commission’s Certification Rules to Ensure Effective State Pole Attachment Regulation. The Public Notice asks for comments on the effectiveness of regulations in States that have chosen to regulate pole attachments, meaning rules that regulate how telcos and others get access to poles that are in the public right-of-way. Comments are due on the Public Notice by July 13, 2026. States were given the right to regulate pole attachments in Section 224 of the 1934 Communications Act. Twenty-three States have elected to regulate poles over the years, and the FCC has created regulations for the States that have not done so. In one of the oddities of regulatory language, States that have elected to regulate pole attachments are said to have “reverse-preempted” the federal pole attachment rules.
American households still find themselves in a financial crunch when it comes to the cost of housing, healthy food, healthcare, and more. But there is at least one major household expense moving in…
US cable operators and telcos are all leaning hard into convergence, but cable holds key cost and footprint advantages, says MoffettNathanson.
London, UK (23 June 2026) – Data centres, the infrastructure powering the global digital economy, are being built in cities worldwide at unprecedented speed. In many cases, residents fear that this rapid growth risks pushing up energy costs, straining water supplies and electricity grids and adding more urban heat to neighbourhoods.
EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio -- City officials, AT&T and JobsOhio will gather Tuesday afternoon to announce the near completion of a public-private partnership aimed at expanding high-speed Internet access in the city. The event, scheduled for 1 p.m. at the East Cleveland Public Library, will mark the launch of AT&T Fiber service in East Cleveland, and include the donation of 50 refurbished laptops to residents who completed digital literacy courses through the library.
Street Insider reports… Nextlink Internet has expanded its agreement with Aviat Networks (NASDAQ: AVNW) to deploy microwave, E-Band, and multi-band wireless transport systems across Nextlink's 12-state service area, according to a press release from Aviat Networks. The deployment is tied to Nextlink's participation in the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, for which the company has secured more than $180 million in funding. Nextlink has also previously received $429.2 million through the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The company recently activated what it described as the first wireless tower funded under the BEAD program.
Big Tech is throwing big money into data center buildouts. As national opposition to the facilities grows, some workers are beginning to question whether it’s worth it.
Broadband Breakfast reports… The Senate unanimously approved a bill Thursday aimed at strengthening oversight of the government's broadband funding map. The MAP for Broadband Funding Act, passed by voice vote, would require the Federal Communications Commission to conduct a formal inquiry into the accuracy, functionality, and usability of the Broadband Funding Map, a tool created to track federally funded broadband deployment projects.
New crypto regulations could benefit Trump family, warns government watchdog. Analysis reveals potential tax loopholes for ultrawealthy. In an analysis published on Monday, the Revolving Door Project (RDP) highlighted new crypto-related tax bills being discussed in the House Ways and Means Committee, including one that “would create a functional subsidy for cryptocurrency firms by allowing them to defer taxes owed on their mined coins indefinitely and without interest, so long as the firms do not sell the coins.”
Today, we are launching the AI Status Copyright Cases Tracker. It depicts all 118 copyright lawsuits against AI companies in the United States by the stage of litigation: pre-discovery, discovery, summary judgment, interlocutory and direct appeals, and Supreme Court. It also depicts how the same AI companies are commonly facing multiple lawsuits filed by different plaintiffs — a phenomenon known as parallel litigation. Parallel litigation has occurred in a variety of areas of law. In the copyright context, the RIAA lawsuits against music file-sharers and Strike 3 Holdings against John Doe defendants who illegally filed shared their videos provide two examples of parallel litigation involving the same plaintiffs suing different defendants. What’s different about the AI copyright lawsuits is that the parallel litigation involves both the same plaintiffs or plaintiffs in the same class (e.g., book authors, YouTube creators, visual artists, newspapers, publishers, musicians, music publishers) and some of the the same defendant AI companies.
- The data center, called Project Kilby, is expected to consume nearly 2.7 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to about 2 million homes.
- A majority of the electricity will come from large gas turbines provided by Chevron partner GE Vernova.
- Chevron expects the data center will start receiving power in 2028.
Microsoft's embrace of natural gas shows a willingness to invest in fossil fuels to meet the power demand needed in its data centers. Chevron will fuel a massive Microsoft data center in West Texas with natural gas under a 20-year agreement, the oil major announced Monday. The data center, called Project Kilby, is expected to consume nearly 2.7 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to the power needed to run about 2 million homes. Most of the electricity will come from large gas turbines supplied by Chevron’s partner, GE Vernova. Caterpillar will also provide turbines. The power is dedicated to the data center and will not be connected to the electric grid.
Employees had previously raised concerns about the initiative, which involves collecting workers’ keystroke data to train AI models. Meta left potentially sensitive information collected from employee laptops accessible to anyone inside the company, according to an internal security notice seen by WIRED and three current employees familiar with the issue. The data, which was collected as part of a divisive initiative to train artificial intelligence models, is believed to include keystrokes, mouseclicks, and content displayed on the computer screens of Meta’s US employees.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is criticising his fellow tech executives for their heavy-handed sell of artificial intelligence. After cementing himself as the leader of one of the top AI companies in the world, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has some biting criticism for his rival tech executives. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Nadella raged that tech companies have been a little too honest in how they spin the trillion-dollar AI race — an industry dictated by a few major tech companies that have dragged the world into an AI financial bubble.
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Trump’s rewrite of rural broadband rules helped Musk steer public money toward Starlink to strengthen SpaceX and screw rural Americans.
When surveyed about AI, fear barely varies by age or income. The real split is hope and the hardening among Americans who have never tried AI.
Vodafone IoT CEO Erik Brenneis tells Light Reading that it will launch satellite connectivity from Iridium and Skylo this year to expand global coverage.
BEAD was meant to expand access to high-quality broadband, but under Trump, it’s been diverted to tech moguls like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. At 9PM ET on the night of May 28th, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket sat on the launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The craft was in the middle of a hot-fire test awaiting the arrival of Amazon Leo satellites, the first of 24 batches to be shuttled into low Earth orbit for an ambitious satellite internet venture. The effort was backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, leveraging a Biden-era law meant to address America’s digital divide. But before the satellites even reached the launch site, Jeff Bezos’ rocket exploded into a massive fireball, its wreckage left smoldering on the ground. It was an unintentionally perfect metaphor for a once-in-a-generation attempt to fix the creaky US broadband system, now a flaming mess melting into a slush fund for billionaires. Bezos — along with newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk — has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program passed as part of President Joe Biden’s 2021 “Build Back Better” initiative. BEAD was intended to give long-underserved communities billions of dollars for high-quality, future-proof fiber networks.
The National Tribal Telecommunications Association hosted the 2026 Tribal Broadband Midwest Summit in Minnesota. It was fun to hear the stories from Minnesota and learn from what’s happening in other areas, such as Arizona. It’s clear to see that data center (emphasis on micro-data centers!) and AI are hot topics. Funding, and what’s happening with BEAD and other federal funding, is also a hot topic, although there are federal funds that are available exclusively to tribal areas. Shared barriers included questions about what may happen with federal funding, inflation and balancing POTS (landlines) with LEO (satellites).
Linda Hardesty of Fierce Network recently quoted Verizon’s new CEO Dan Shulman as saying that the company is looking at market segmentation. He said that instead of pricing for a few market segments that Verizon might be considering hundreds of thousands of segments. Hardesty said this stunned her, because nobody has ever talked seriously about market segmentation to that extent before. What Verizon is thinking about doing is to develop multitudes of products and prices to fit small market niches, or even individuals.
As tech giants hunt for massive amounts of clean electricity, PNNL, Nvidia and Fervo Energy are partnering to develop a new public tool that aims to eliminate the guesswork of drilling into the Earth's molten depths.
While social media bans for kids have gained a foothold in more than 40 countries, it’s still an open question whether they’re legal in the U.S. Australia was the first to require age verification for social media accounts in December, and the United Kingdom announced plans to follow suit last week. Ohio, Mississippi and a handful of other states have passed similar laws, and Florida recently sued TikTok, claiming the platform violated its child safety legislation. Yet such policies have run headfirst into America’s speech protections. Courts have blocked nearly all of the state bans, though the Florida and Ohio laws have been restored pending further litigation. The country’s robust tradition of free expression could ultimately prevent it from following the global trend of keeping kids off of social media. “Age authentication simultaneously affects the interests of children, of adults and of publishers,” Santa Clara University tech law professor Eric Goldman told DFD. “It’s a trifecta of constitutional problems.”
Amid funding uncertainty, existing programs may offer starting point to build workforce. [This article is also available on the Pew website] After several years of planning, states and territories are receiving final approval of their plans for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, a federal initiative that aims to connect all Americans to high-speed internet. For states to meet the goal of completing all infrastructure projects by 2030, expansion of the broadband workforce is critical. Analysis from The Pew Charitable Trusts has found that worker availability, wages and competition, and data limitations present barriers to growing the workforce. States and internet service providers (ISPs) should consider how labor availability will affect their ability to complete BEAD projects on time, particularly amid a historically shrinking workforce and competition with other industries for similarly skilled workers as data center expansion accelerates.
Claude's chatbot may ask to verify your age and identity "in certain circumstances," such as with a passport or driver's license, according to a privacy policy change.
The loop takes agentic AI a step further by authorizing a swarm of agents to work continuously in the background, endlessly. On Friday, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny made an appearance at Meta’s @Scale conference and, surprisingly, the first question from the audience was about loops. “Are loops the next hype cycle,” the questioner asked, “or are they for real?” Cherny’s answer was an emphatic, “Yes, they’re for real.” “Two years ago, we wrote source code by hand. We started to transition so agents write the code. And now we’re transitioning to the point where agents are prompting agents that then write the code,” he continued. “As big as the step from source code to agents was, loops are just as important and as big a step.”
We’ve gathered stories from all across the country detailing what happens when Big Tech’s latest monstrosities come to town. While some are worse than others, the stories people tell about how data centers invade and disrupt their communities follow the same contours. The tech company and their swarm of contractors are in town before you know it, and they’re already scheming with local leaders. In no uncertain terms, your elected officials have chosen tech billionaires over their own neighbors. Soon, an army of men with bulldozers are tearing out trees near your home and ripping up fields. Dump trucks careen around town, and the night sky is so polluted with light, you can’t see the stars. A year or so later, the data center is up and running. By then, the high-paying construction jobs have all but disappeared. After months of digging, you finally have an idea of how much water the data center actually consumes. If you’re lucky, your area isn’t in a drought. You hope things won’t get dire. Meanwhile, the monolith is droning and hissing, wearing you and your neighbors down with constant noise. You hope the water you do have will be drinkable this time next year as you try to adjust to the unnatural heat the data center generates. The militaristic drive to build the best chatbot and somehow “beat China” knows no bounds, including those of logic.
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