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Public Knowledge, Free Press and TechFreedom staged a protest outside of the 2025 Federal Communications Bar Association's annual dinner. On the evening of December 3, the Federal Communications Bar Association (FCBA) held its 37th Annual Dinner, hosting more than 1,500 telecommunications and technology policy professionals – including some of Public Knowledge’s own staff. As in years past, the Federal Communications Commission chair is a featured speaker, and many FCC staffers, including its commissioners, attend the dinner. Public Knowledge staff who normally attend the dinner asserted that attending this year felt different. The FCBA dinner is, at least partly, intended to raise money to provide college scholarships to students – an important cause to ensure a robust pipeline of quality graduates find their way into the tech policy space (including to organizations like Public Knowledge). But it also gives the FCC chair a platform for a speech in the form of a comedic set. At a time when Chairman Brendan Carr has been using regulatory power to silence President Trump’s critics and reward his allies, including attacks on Jimmy Kimmel (which temporarily forced the comedian’s show off the air in September) and new attacks on Seth Meyers, another late-night comedian, just last month, we bristled at the idea of Chairman Carr using his right to free speech in a standup performance while bullying comedians for doing the same. Chairman Carr has not hesitated to publicly threaten to punish media who step “out of line” by revoking their broadcast licenses.
Chairman Carr’s threats clearly weaponize the agency against media who disagree with the Trump administration – and they also clearly strike at the First Amendment protection of free speech and a free press.
The European Commission announced Friday that it was fining Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, for the equivalent of $140 million, saying his company X had breached Europe’s Digital Services Act. The act, which took effect around the same time Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, is a kind of digital rulebook meant to crack down on illegal or potentially harmful content. Vice President JD Vance, before the fine was even finalized, slammed the commission, claiming that it was targeting US companies.
The European Commission has fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million (around $140 million) for breaching its transparency rules under the Digital Services Act. The European Union’s executive arm announced that it was investigating the social media company’s blue checkmarking verification system — first introduced when it was still known as Twitter — last year, along with other alleged DSA violations. Today’s verdict concerns the "deceptive design" of the checkmark, as well as "the lack of transparency of [X's] advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers."
Today, NTIA Chair Arielle Roth addressed the National Press Club and provided an update on the BEAD program and final proposal approvals.
Instead of publishing a press release as it had with the prior approvals for 20 states & territories, the NTI
A presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency unveiled Big Tech’s vision of an AI and nuclear fueled future.
Looking at BEAD, BOB, and the new guidelines that moved away from ‘fiber-first,’ I wanted to see what this meant for final BEAD allocation in numbers, percentages, and dollars. BEAD was once thought to be a venture that would provide 80-90% fiber /t
The following are my predictions for 2026. I noticed that after I wrote this, the overall tenor of the list is negative. I’m generally pretty upbeat, but I can’t find fault with any of the predictions. Federal Regulators Will Continue to Ignore Congress. Federal broadband regulators will continue to ignore Congressional legislation. This past year,…
Can any company, big or small, really topple Nvidia's AI chip dominance? Maybe not entirely, but Amazon is already making big bucks trying.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has partnered with Palantir Technologies—a Denver-based software company co-founded by billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel—to use artificial intelligence and data mining to identify, track, and deport suspected noncitizens. Palantir is slated to deliver a prototype of the ImmigrationOS platform by September 25, 2025, with the contract running through September 2027. ICE is paying Palantir $30 million for the platform. Similar to Palantir’s other systems, ImmigrationOS will pull together vast amounts of data, detect patterns, and flag individuals who meet certain criteria, raising concerns about potential impacts on civil liberties in America. Those concerns are amplified by the revelation that Stephen Miller, the Trump administration’s chief architect of immigration policy, holds a substantial financial stake in Palantir—underscoring the potential conflicts of interest in the government’s embrace of the company’s technology. The plan, first reported by Business Insider, has triggered lawsuits from privacy and labor rights advocates and raises serious concerns about accuracy, justice, and civil rights. For its part, Palantir says it only builds the tools, not the rules. However, the architecture of an AI system—how it integrates data, flags individuals, and triggers action—is a form of policymaking. Designing a system like ImmigrationOS means deciding which data is included, what prompts alerts, and what gets overlooked.
Regulatory capture is at the root of the affordability crisis in electricity. Public power could offer a way out.
It’s Thanksgiving time again, and time to list those things for which I am thankful. As I’ve been talking to folks lately, there is a lot of angst in the industry as things are rapidly changing. But I think there are still plenty of things to be thankful for. Broadband Networks Being Built. You couldn’t…
A company looking to build a high-speed internet line under Lake Michigan.. gets the greenlight to build in Benton Harbor.According to our reporting partners at
The Internet Society published a blog by Isabel Suizo of Carnegie Mellon University that looks at Starlink’s impact on digital equity. The blog made three interesting points about Starlink. First, Starlink is not meeting the regulatory performance goals in the U.S., the EU, and Australia. The blog cites speed tests from M-Labs that show that…
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What people do in their homes is no one’s business but their own. But in multiple residential buildings across San Francisco, landlords have forced tenants to accept so-called “smart home” systems that monitor their comings and goings and other behavior. And they are using tenants’ personal information to track them, potentially even profiling their behavior with AI tools built specially for landlords. Today, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and our legal partners Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP and Tobener Ravenscroft LLP, sued landlord Equity Residential and surveillance technology vendor SmartRent in San Francisco Superior Court for violating tenants’ constitutional privacy rights in their homes.
New Networks and our new addition, the IRREGULATORS, are an independent, expert team comprised of senior telecom experts, analysts, forensic auditors, and lawyers who are former senior staffers from the FCC, state advocate and Attorneys General Office lawyers, as well as former telco consultants. FREE DOWNLOAD “The Book of Broken Promises” (pdf)
A follow-on legal case about the USF resumed on Wednesday, Dec. 3, in the Fifth Circuit.
In a repeat of the silliest blog I write every year, this blog covers the annual pronouncement from USTelecom that broadband prices have dropped again in 2025. USTelecom has a press release about this same time every year that claims that broadband prices are dropping. The claim this year is that the ‘real price’ for…
https://youtu.be/JCZuZxtQe_k?si=gBEUKhlw0WSBqq_3 Description of the event from the hosts: America's Rural Future: Brookings–AEI Commission on U.S. Rural Prosperity is a bipartisan initiative co-chaired by former Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, and former Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican. America's Rural Future brings together a cross-section of the country—spanning diverse backgrounds, regions, values, and industries—to inform its…
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s been a rough couple weeks for the Oakland-based activist group Stop AI. Police are still searching for Sam Kirchner, the group’s co-founder, after they notified OpenAI that he might attack employees, causing the company’s San Francisco offices to go on lockdown in late November. Three Stop AI members have a court date on Friday to face misdemeanor charges for shackling themselves to the entrance of OpenAI’s headquarters in February. And more broadly, the group has emerged as a bogeyman for the pro-AI lobby in the national debate about artificial intelligence’s risks.
Last night, California posted its BEAD Final Proposal for comment before submission to the NTIA on December 9.
As we are wading through final final proposals, let’s take a look at the proposed numbers from California, the last state to submit.
A U.S. Congressional bill, H.R. 2289, would remove historic and environmental reviews for cell tower and wireless facilities - ignoring the growing science on cell tower health effects.
It’s clear that federal funding for digital inclusion activities is dead. NTIA and the Administration killed the funding for the Digital Equity Act, and it’s looking increasingly certain that NTIA is going to kill most or all of the BEAD non-deployment funds. These two sources of funding were going to be used to get a…
AT&T recently agreed to purchase the 3.45 GHz spectrum from EchoStar and was able to deploy the new spectrum in 23,000 AT&T cell sites in a matter of weeks. The company will use this spectrum to beef up 5G speeds and to also power its FWA cellular home broadband product it markets as AT&T Air.…
OpenAI's CEO is reportedly pushing for improvements to ChatGPT and delaying plans to integrate ads on its platform, after Google’s strong showing with Gemini 3.
The 2024 American Community Survey (ACS) shows essentially no change in wireline broadband adoption between 2023 and 2024 and just a 1-point increase in the share of households with broadband of any type. The primary growth in broadband adoption of any type occurred among households with subscriptions to cellular data plans for smartphones. The figure below shows the data.
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Scoop.it!
