Earlier this week JoAnne Johnson, from U-reka Broadband, gave a great presentation on broadband policy at the state and national level as part of the Policy & Progress: Border to Border Broadband pre-conference webinar series.
Criticism continues to pour in from a group of unlikely bedfellows, namely, several prominent progressive lawmakers and banking industry groups worried about the dangers shaky stablecoin regulation poses to the traditional financial system.
The wheels are in motion to frame legitimate backlash to extractive and racist technofascism as radical, dangerous, unAmerican criminality.
If you're one of these folks oddly surprised why the animosity against AI is so white hot, or why younger Americans have inextricably linked AI to the broader rotten body politic, I'd like to direct your attention to Memphis, Tennessee.
In south Memphis, Elon Musk Corp is building two massive new data centers: Colossus 1 and Colossus 2. These data centers are powered by 57 natural gas turbines that are pumping smog and toxic pollutants into minority Memphis neighborhoods that already see a disproportionate rate of pollution-fueled illness.
The pollution isn't meaningfully regulated because America, as I may have mentioned once or twice, is grotesquely corrupt. And our corporate press is too financially compromised to inform Americans that this corruption has completely hollowed out regulators Americans spent generations taking for granted.
The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) notes that just Colossus 2’s 35 gas turbines alone have the potential to emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (“NOx”), formaldehyde, and other carcinogenic HAPs (Hazardous AIR Pollutants) into predominantly poor, minority neighborhoods.
So last April the SELC, AARP, and Earthjustice filed a lawsuit against the effort, correctly pointing out the unpermitted pollution violated the Clean Air Act, and asked for an injunction pausing construction until something vaguely resembling compliance safeguards existed.
Houston-based fiber internet provider Ezee Fiber is expanding its high-speed broadband footprint across the Chicago suburbs.
Construction is underway in Streamwood, Roselle, Downers Grove, Naperville, Oak Brook and Bartlett.
“Expanding our construction footprint into new Illinois communities is an exciting next step for Ezee Fiber,” said Greg Thomas, senior vice president and general manager for Ezee Fiber’s Midwest region. “We’re proud to bring next-generation fiber infrastructure to these communities, and we want residents and local leaders to know exactly what to expect as our crews begin work in their neighborhoods.”
FCC refuses to provide messages, has "wasted a year" of court's time, filing says.
An advocacy group trying to investigate DOGE’s influence on the Federal Communications Commission accused the FCC of failing to comply with a public records request and of concealing Chairman Brendan Carr’s use of the Signal messaging service.
“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request,” journalist Nina Burleigh and advocacy group Frequency Forward said in a filing yesterday in US District Court for the District of Columbia. “The FCC acted in bad faith when it redefined the search criteria without notice to Plaintiffs or this Court. Further, the FCC acted in bad faith by concealing the fact that the Chairman Carr has a Signal account on a phone he uses to conduct government business.”
Burleigh and Frequency Forward sued the FCC last year, alleging that it violated the Freedom of Information Act by wrongfully withholding agency records. In August 2025, a federal judge ordered the FCC to produce documents and criticized it for a “vague and uninformative” response to the lawsuit.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that, if adopted, will dramatically impact local governments’ ability to manage their public rights-of-way.
The NPRM proposes to unconstitutionally deprive local governments’ property rights by capping rental fees for a telecommunications providers’ occupation of the public right-of-way to “a reasonable approximation of the government’s actual, direct costs of managing the rights-of-way,” not market value or just compensation as is the current standard in most communities. Limiting rent to below market rates could prove to be a significant blow to many local government budgets.
How Memphis Forged an Innovative Public-Private Partnership that will make it one of the Most Fiber-Connected Cities in America.
The City of Memphis’ Smart Memphis Fiber project represents one of the most innovative and consequential municipal broadband initiatives in the United States. Through a creative public-private partnership model that was approved by the City in 2024, Memphis has secured citywide fiber competition (meaning residents will have more than one high-speed internet provider to choose from) and a commitment to delivering fiber service to low-income neighborhoods. In doing so, Memphis has positioned itself to become one of the most fiber-connected cities in America.
What makes Memphis’ success so remarkable is the context in which it was achieved. Memphis is a city where economic challenges are real and persistent. Yet City leaders recognized that accepting the status quo—where fiber investment flows only to areas with the highest disposable incomes—would perpetuate the challenges.
The Mythos controversy should not be viewed as a dispute about one firm's policies. It is better understood as an early warning signal, writes Andrew W. Reddie.
Late on Friday, Semafor reported that the United States government appears to have relaxed its restriction of Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, allowing major US firms and government agencies access to its latest offering. In a letter to the company, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick indicated he had “determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” and that “a license will no longer be required to export, reexport, or in-country transfer” the technology to a list of specific entities, their foreign national employees, and Anthropic’s own foreign national employees.
The news suggests this latest dispute between the Trump administration and the AI firm is at least partially resolved. But Lutnick’s letter does little to answer deeper questions about the blunt tool the government used to restrict Mythos in the first place: export controls. How we got here.
Broadband is critical to Pennsylvania’s economy, public services, and quality of life, enabling access to work, education, healthcare, and government services. Its importance is especially pronounced in rural and post-industrial communities, where connectivity supports economic opportunity and access to essential resources.
Yet major gaps remain: over 130,000 locations lack broadband access, and roughly 2 million households struggle to afford service.
These disparities reinforce existing inequalities, making universal, affordable broadband a central requirement for equitable growth across the Commonwealth.
Three credible sources put Amazon’s data center capacity at 10.6, 6.2, and 2.3 gigawatts. The gap between them is the most important number in the AI buildout.
A clean chart built on Jefferies and Aterio data has been circulating this week, via Axios: North America’s largest data center operators, ranked by gigawatts. Amazon leads at 10.6 GW, then Microsoft (5.5), Google (5.2) and Meta (4.8), with Digital Realty and QTS tied at 2.5. It’s a good chart. It’s also one snapshot through one lens, and the lens does more work than the ranking does.
“Capacity” is not one thing. Jefferies’ 10.6 GW for Amazon counts a controlled power footprint: capacity the company owns or leases, energized or not, with cooling overhead included. Reconstruct the same companies from operating-IT load, the deployable critical IT actually running at live facilities, the way it’s pulled from 10-K filings, Synergy Research and Dell’Oro, and Amazon is 6.2 GW. The most conservative “active load” snapshots put it closer to 2.3.
Explore mobile network performance along the 2026 Tour de France route using Speedtest Intelligence data to reveal coverage strengths and weaknesses before the race begins.
The 2026 Tour de France will be one of the most technically demanding connectivity events in European sport this year. Spanning 3,333 kilometers from a landmark Grand Départ in Barcelona to the Champs-Élysées in Paris, the 113th edition of the race moves through high-density urban centers, remote Pyrenean passes, the sparsely populated interior of the Massif Central, and some of the most storied Alpine climbs in cycling history. For mobile operators in both Spain and France, the event represents a three-week stress test across terrain that ranges from excellent urban coverage to some of the most persistent connectivity gaps in Western Europe.
Key Takeaways
The weakest stretch of network performance on the 2026 route is not in the high mountains but in the rural interior of central and southwestern France. Stages through Périgueux, Bergerac, Malemort, and Ussel (Stages 8 and 9) record route quality scores of 59 to 61 out of 100, falling well below the Pyrenean and Alpine stages where operators typically anticipate the greatest augmentation needs. This “soft middle” of the route represents the corridor where permanent network investment has been thinnest, and it may be harder to bring temporary event infrastructure to these locations because they are far from urban staging areas.
The legendary legal scholar says we must ‘resist the stories that we’re being told that tell us that there’s nothing that we can or should do to change the circumstances’
Intersectionality. Critical race theory. These are the concepts Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is famous for coining. With them, she’s given us a vocabulary to talk about the ways the law and our society erase significant portions of our population — particularly Black women.
Crenshaw, who is a distinguished professor of law at UCLA, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, has written a new book, Backtalker: An American Memoir.
Backtalker details Crenshaw’s experiences at the intersection of racism and sexism — and explores how she and her parents responded to them.
After years of reporting on far-right militias, OTM co-host Micah Loewinger knew that extremist groups often showed up after natural disasters to recruit, fundraise, and spit-shine their public image. But it wasn’t clear why they hated FEMA so much. After digging around in right-wing media archives, it became clear that the anti-FEMA lore went back decades.
The four-part investigation examines how the agency tasked with saving America became so distrusted, despised, and defunded and, looking to the future, how the agency will be reshaped during the Trump administration.
On June 24th at 7pm, reporter Nancy Solomon will speak to Micah Loewinger and his series collaborator, OTM Senior Producer Eloise Blondiau, about the making of American Emergency, and they will be joined on stage by former FEMA official MaryAnn Tierney who will offer her expertise on the agency she worked at for more than a decade.
Reflecting on his career, April remarked, "I've worked my way down to the smallest television market and couldn't be happier."
Jay April, President and CEO of Akakū Maui Community Media, was honored with a Special Recognition Award on Wednesday at the Alliance for Community Media’s National Conference in Madison, Wisconsin.
The award recognizes April’s contributions and leadership as a community television and small-format video pioneer whose work helped lay the foundation for public access media.
Over a career spanning more than four decades, April has made contributions across multiple sectors of the media industry.
Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld testified before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.
His testimony in the hearing on “Where Are We?: Examining Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Capabilities (PNT) in the United States” urged Congress to preserve the current GPS system while ensuring a basic tier of PNT for free to the general public even as GPS continues to evolve.
Public Knowledge contends that next-generation GPS should serve the public interest. View the written testimony for more information.
ABC's fight with the FCC could redefine press freedom by testing whether regulators can pressure news organizations without directly censoring them.
ABC’s legal battle with the FCC may become one of the most important press freedom cases in decades.
Because the outcome could determine whether government agencies can use regulatory power to pressure news organizations over speech they don’t like.
For years, press freedom battles in America have usually involved direct government action: attempts to block publication, force disclosure of sources, or punish journalists for reporting. Courts have developed extensive First Amendment protections against them.
WASHINGTON – US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warned Anthropic in a letter that it would need government permission to grant foreign nationals access to its most advanced AI models and threatened criminal and civil penalties if the firm failed to comply, according to a copy seen by Bloomberg News.
The letter, dated June 12, ordered Anthropic not to give its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models to foreign nationals anywhere in the world without a licence from the US Commerce Department. Lutnick gave no basis for why the restrictions were necessary, but his letter cited US laws that allow the government to impose export controls on civilian technology that could be used for intelligence purposes by an adversary’s military.
“Until further notice, you must submit an application for an individually-validated license prior to the export, re-export, or transfer (in-country), including deemed export or deemed re-export, of the Mythos or Fable models to any destination worldwide or to any ‘foreign person’ wherever located,” Lutnick wrote in the letter, addressed to Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei.
The one thing you don't want to say when a data center is coming to your community is:
"It's inevitable. Get on board or get left behind."
Yet that's often the message communities hear.
Data Centers Have a PR Problem. It's Not the Building.
Texas is booming with data center projects. Few states can match the infrastructure, power availability, and development timelines that technology companies are seeking. State and federal leaders increasingly view data centers as critical infrastructure, and many see leadership in AI as a matter of economic competitiveness and national security.
At the local level, the appeal is obvious. Cities and economic development organizations see new tax revenue, infrastructure investment, and opportunities for long-term growth.
But if you've attended a public meeting on a proposed data center recently, you've probably noticed something interesting: People aren't reacting to the project like it's just another industrial development. And that's because, in many cases, they're not.
The mistake many developers make is believing they're communicating about a building. The public sees something else entirely.
Fox Corp's agreement to acquire Roku for $22 billion marked a notable strategic turn for one of the country’s largest owners of a broadcast network, local TV stations and a major cable news channel.
Fox’s $22 billion acquisition of the streaming giant yet another sign that a Big Four broadcast network sees its future online, not on free, over-the-air TV.
Bringing these two companies together really will help define the future of television in the United States and in many other markets around the world.”
Last August, Fox launched Fox One, a $19.99 a month streaming app providing access to Fox Sports, Fox News, FS1, FS2, and the Big Ten Network unbundled from the cable package.
President Gwynne Shotwell told investors during a recent IPO roadshow that SpaceX could build its own terrestrial mobile network.
A push into direct consumer sales of mobile service — one that would place SpaceX alongside Verizon $VZ +1.02%, AT&T $T +1.34%, and T-Mobile $TMUS +0.61% as a rival — is now in the company's plans, the Financial Times reported, drawing on people with knowledge of the situation.
SpaceXAI will resume construction of a Memphis wastewater treatment plant by Q1 2027, supporting its AI data center's cooling needs and local sustainability efforts.
Allen, Texas, put a few videos on its new YouTube channel in 2007 just to see what would happen. Today the channel has a subscriber base few local governments could match.
Allen, Texas, launched its YouTube channel in 2007. At first, it was an experiment in sharing content from the city’s cable channel on the new platform.
In the years since, it has attracted enough subscribers to place it in the top 1 percent of active YouTube channels.
City commitment to building a national brand, and sustained leadership in the media department, have aided this success.
It’s been a little more than two months, since April 22 to be exact, when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told the Senate Commerce Committee that non-deployment money guidance would be issued “…over the next two months…”
In testimony on the Hill in April, it was clear Lutnick didn’t want to be pinned down with a timeline or deadline as he said non-deployment guidance would come ‘shortly’ or ‘soon.’
Implored by U.S. Senators to be more specific, he replied that, “Over the next two months we expect to have guidance.”
He assured the Senate Committee that, in spite of chairman and U.S. Senator Jerry Moran’s (R-Kan.) concerns, that the NTIA would NOT claw back non-deployment dollars because he was bound by the ‘laws of the statute.’
AI models have progressed to the point where their capabilities have real political consequences. Dealing with those consequences will require collective action.
The U.S. government is set to take an awful lot of control over which AI models get released.
Two weeks after the U.S. government pulled Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models, OpenAI’s new model seems to be headed for the same limbo. The Information broke the news Thursday that GPT 5.6 would be released only into limited preview, with the government approving the release “customer by customer” until a general release can be approved.
The OSS/BSS company Innovative Systems recently released its eleventh annual survey about rural household broadband usage. As usual, it contains a number of interesting insights. The survey was conducted in the first quarter of 2026 to consumers across the country.
Here are some of the most interesting findings about usage:
39% of rural households use broadband more than 10 hours per day. Only 7% use broadband for less than 3 hours per day.
The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has signed off on Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. The approval, first reported by POLITICO, clears a major regulatory hurdle for a deal that has become one of the most closely watched media merger reviews of the Trump era.
The decision, announced Friday, paves the way for Paramount to combine with the entertainment and media company behind a vast film and television studio, CNN, and the HBO Max streaming service, which would be combined with Paramount+ to create a new offering boasting about 200 million subscribers. The deal, which would upend the Hollywood ecosystem by combining two historic rival studios, is opposed by many in the entertainment industry who fear it could lead to mass layoffs, among other concerns.
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