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KTTC reports… Google’s announcement that they won’t seek a tax abatement for a proposed data center in the City of Hermantown is drawing mixed reactions from communities in Minnesota. While the Hermantown project has often been in the statewide spotlight, dozens of other Minnesota communities are in various stages of planning, proposing, or building a data center nearby. In Hermantown’s case, the abatement was initially approved by the city to offer Google an incentive to build in the area. Without the abatement, the project stands to generate up to $240 million in regional property taxes.
Earlier this week, a federal court heard arguments in ABC’s lawsuit against the FCC, one of the most consequential press freedom cases in years. ABC is suing the FCC over the agency’s unprecedented early review of its broadcast licenses in retaliation for the network’s coverage of the Trump administration. In a special event, The Jim Acosta Show and If You Can Keep It brought together award-winning journalist Jim Acosta, former senior FCC official Gigi Sohn, and Protect Democracy Special Counsel Rachel Goodman for a live conversation about ABC’s fight against the FCC, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s ongoing effort to weaponize the FCC as a tool for censorship, the threats to an independent press, and what it means for the 2026 midterm elections.
AI agents from multiple providers accessed personal data and confidential material at Indian organizations during research and testing, India’s cybersecurity agency said Thursday. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said it had received “multiple voluntary disclosures from AI model providers” whose models, during research and evaluation runs on the open internet, “had reached the live systems of Indian organizations.” The agents got in through credentials and connection settings left exposed in app configurations, public code repositories, and overly permissive cloud roles.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 15, 2026 — The Nov. 3 midterm elections are unlikely to produce major federal AI legislation, but the story told afterward could change how both parties approach the technology, four telecom policy experts said Wednesday during BroadbandLive. A standoff over preemption, the power of federal law to override state rules, awaits the next Congress regardless of the result, said Blair Levin, a senior fellow at New York University's Center on Technology Policy. He was chief of staff to former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt and led the Obama administration's National Broadband Plan. Preemption remains the sticking point Democrats will likely win the House and refuse to pass an AI bill that broadly preempts state and local rules, Levin said during a Broadband Breakfast Live Online session. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is unlikely to sign one that leaves those state laws standing.
Ookla issued one of its periodic reports that looks at broadband speed statistics across the country and ranks the states in terms of overall broadband speeds. The report uses speed test data at the end of the second quarter of 2026. https://www.ookla.com/research/reports/50-us-state-broadband-speed-report-1h-2026-access-form As usual, this kind of report has to be taken with a grain of salt since it averages all broadband speed tests from all ISPs and all technologies, so there are a ton of factors that influence a state’s broadband speed. Issues like the mix of people electing slow versus fast packages, the mix of technologies and ISPs, and the degree of competition all impact a given state’s average speed.
Washington state is moving from talking about artificial intelligence to building the rules for using it in public services. The state’s AI Strategy and Roadmap calls for human-focused, trusted AI, while Washington Technology Services’ current design-review work is moving through its expansion into broader agency use cases. The Attorney General’s Artificial Intelligence Task Force has also delivered its final report. That is useful infrastructure. But for residents, the real test of responsible AI will not be whether Olympia has a policy binder. It will be whether a person can understand and challenge an AI-assisted decision that affects them. Washington should add a simple requirement to that emerging governance system: a decision receipt.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 15, 2026) – The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition, issued the following statement on today’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Consumers’ Research v. FCC. “We are disappointed by today’s decision. Last year, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Universal Service Fund, and today’s ruling does not change that. Today’s decision only addresses issues surrounding USAC authority,” said Joey Wender, Executive Director of the SHLB Coalition. “SHLB is reviewing the decision with our legal counsel and will work with the FCC and other stakeholders to determine how best to respond to this decision to ensure the Universal Service Fund can continue its important work.”
While nearly 80% of public sector information technology leaders say their government’s AI adoption is aligning with AI oversight planning, just 37% have a formal, actively enforced AI governance framework in place according to a recent survey by research firm UserEvidence. Only 19% of state and local government IT professionals reported an active AI oversight framework, and just 20% say such a framework exists at all. “Confidence in AI governance is running well ahead of the actual controls agencies have in place, and that gap is where risk quietly accumulates,” Travis Galloway, senior advisor, government affairs at SolarWinds, a software provider that commissioned the report, said in a news release.
David Ellison’s freshly formed Skydance Corp. is off to a rocky start on Wall Street. He won Warner Bros. Discovery after a yearlong battle. But investors, at this point, appear to believe he wildly overpaid for the deal — that the newly merged company, dubbed Skydance Corp., is worth nowhere near the $78 billion in cash Paramount shelled out for WBD. As of Oct. 5, the last day of trading for WBD and Paramount Skydance (PSKY) on Nasdaq, Warner Bros. Discovery had a market capitalization of $77.7 billion and Paramount was around $11 billion. Today, Skydance has a market cap of under $40 billion — less than half the predecessor companies’ combined value.
Starlink recently announced plans for some interesting billing options. First, they will consider allowing customers to resell bandwidth to their neighbors by setting up small local grids. They are also considering allowing for billing by the hour, day, or week. What’s interesting about this is if this introduced in the U.S., it would allow for broadband billing in ways that already happen in many other parts of the world. As an example, I’ve done some work in Nigeria, where customers struggle to afford broadband, and only businesses and relatively wealthy people buy unlimited monthly plans. The vast majority of broadband is provided by cellular carriers. There are a number of options for buying broadband for short periods of time. Unlike here, there is no loyalty to a specific cellular company, and a customer can choose to buy what is commonly called a daily plan from multiple cellular companies, and many people carry multiple SIM cards.
This biting analysis from bestseller and Baffler cofounder Frank (The People, No) exposes how America’s decades-long fixation on creativity and innovation helped construct an unequal postindustrial society. The author dates the beginning of creativity fervor to post-WWII, when adman Alex F. Osborn, coiner of brainstorming, built a “vast empire” by insisting that “everyone was creative.” From there, Frank tracks the obsession with creativity and innovation through the 1960s “creative revolution,” the ’70s “innovation crisis”—which was treated with tax cuts and deregulation—and the administration of “Innovation President” Barack Obama, whose defense secretary once said innovation 67 times in a single speech. Throughout, Frank grimly points to how creativity and innovation became a means of celebrating white-collar workers as “godlike” while the working class was being systematically dismantled. Turning to the present, Frank offers gimlet-eyed excoriations of American cities’ “frenzy” of gentrification inspired by Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class; former Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley’s flurry of indistinguishable innovation initiatives; and defense contractors’ absurd boasts of artfulness (“At Northrop Grumman creativity guides innovation”). Frank’s wry critique exposes how creativity and innovation are “a marker of ghastliness,” wielded as a justification for policy that benefits only the so-called enlightened few. It’s a sharp look at how prized American values mask inequality. (Oct.)
Amid what she called a "mass surveillance crisis," US Rep. Rashida Tlaib announced legislation on Wednesday to ban the use of federal funds for powerful dragnet spying systems—including the automated license plate-reading cameras manufactured by Flock Safety.
Amid escalating concerns about artificial intelligence from within and beyond the industry and related demands for policymakers worldwide to swiftly enact strong safeguards, attorneys general from eight US states sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Wednesday. “OpenAI designed a product to attract young users and keep them engaged for as long as possible so it could capture their extensive personal data for the company’s commercial benefit,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes in a statement. The public "has suffered irreparable harm—including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse," says one of the eight lawsuits.
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The World Resources Institute reports… This article explores these policy levers, highlights emerging practices from communities across the U.S. and offers practical considerations based on WRI’s ongoing technical assistance to local governments. Together, these levers can shape where data centers are built, how they operate and whether their energy demand supports or undermines broader community goals. Here are the six policy levers…
October 15, 2026 - Can you hear me now? For those of us who remember the cell phone commercials of the early 2000s, it’s a familiar refrain. And despite decades of advances in wireless technology, many of us still find ourselves wandering around the house or stepping outside in hopes of finding a better signal. It’s a familiar frustration, but it points to a larger problem: We often don’t know where our wireless service will actually work until we try to use it. The thing is, wireless companies have detailed information about where their signals are expected to reach and how strong those signals will be. But customers don’t have access to that same information. Instead, we’re left relying on colorful coverage maps that suggest where service is available without necessarily telling us where we can reliably place a call. And this is about more than inconvenience. More than 80 percent of 911 calls in California External Link are now placed from a wireless device. If a wireless signal cannot reach inside the customer’s home, they may not be able to call for help in an emergency.
WASHINGTON — A coalition of unions and nonprofit organizations representing journalists, writers and other communications professionals have urged the Federal Communications Commission to stay a recent order repealing its long-standing and congressionally required National Television Multiple Ownership Rule while a legal challenge regarding the decision can move forward.
Read the petition for a stay.
In 2004, Congress approved legislation directing the FCC to ensure that no owner of television stations reached more than 39 percent of the national audience. This congressional effort reflected a desire to ensure a diversity of perspectives in the press and to avoid monopolies or conglomerate dominance in broadcast media. For more than two decades, the FCC’s regulations respected this congressional directive, but on Oct. 1, 2026, the FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr released the final text of an order repealing the National Television Multiple Ownership Rule — disregarding the law and violating a clear congressional mandate.
On September 21, 12 state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, signed a settlement allowing the media giant Paramount to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, and with it CNN’s newsroom. A judge approved the settlement 11 days later, making it all but certain that the parties will close the roughly $111 billion deal—one of the largest media mergers in history. The merger would create a corporate Goliath that joins Paramount’s studio with Warner Bros., HBO, CBS, and CNN. The capitulation by the attorneys general represents a major concession to corporate power and a threat to press freedom. It also provides a warning for what the oligarchs’ playbook might be if the Democrats take power.
News outlets and press freedom advocates are cheering the latest court ruling against President Donald Trump’s press ban, while cautioning that he will keep trying to punish news coverage he dislikes. CNN chairman and editor-in-chief Mark Thompson said news outlets have to be “forever vigilant” about First Amendment rights. The Justice Department plans to appeal the latest ruling, and its antitrust division is also probing the five major TV networks over how the White House TV pool operates. With all that in mind, Thompson said it’s necessary to “be prepared to fight and to go on fighting.”
Years ago, I spent a good part of my time working on a multi-carrier effort to build interoperable APIs. It wasn't formally a joint venture. Call it a pre-JV. But it had all the ingredients: operators who competed fiercely every day, trying to build something together because none of them could do it alone. Here's what nobody tells you about these efforts: the technology is the easy part. Most of my job happened on the phone. I called member companies to make sure they'd show up to the next meeting. I negotiated what would go on the agenda and, just as often, what wouldn't. Almost every conversation seemed to involve three lawyers, so even straightforward decisions took the long way around. Trust was the constant challenge. These companies spent their days trying to win each other's customers. Asking them to speak candidly in the same room was asking a lot.
Powerful AI models continue to cause chaos, but their targets aren’t widely seeking justice. Instead, they’re being encouraged to adopt those same tools. When Philadelphia police criticized Anthropic last week for submitting a false tip about an unsolved murder, I thought it might become one of the first cases where an AI company faced legal consequences for misconduct by their agents. The incident occurred on July 18, when Anthropic said it was testing its Claude Haiku 4.5 model’s ability to perform “example tasks on randomly selected webpages.” The model was instructed not to “submit anything destructive,” and yet, Claude filed a tip to police looking for information about an ongoing murder investigation. “I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area … during that time period,” Claude wrote. The submission, which didn’t include a name or contact information, landed in a spam folder, and officers didn’t review it until Anthropic discovered the gaffe on September 28 and notified the department October 7. Knowingly providing fictitious information about a crime to police is a misdemeanor in Pennsylvania, but so far, authorities have not pressed charges against Anthropic, and it's unclear if they ever will. Solomon Leach, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia district attorney, says the office “does not comment on whether something is being actively investigated.”
Amazon is disappointed in Oregon, which, depending on the circumstances, can be a reasonably encouraging start to the day. In a letter dated October 9 and reported by OPB this week, Governor Tina Kotek asked the Department of Environmental Quality to pause processing and issuing air and water discharge permits for new or expanding data centers until July 1, 2027. The directive also covers municipal wastewater permit changes intended to accommodate those facilities. That gives the state a substantial brake on development beyond its earlier pause involving state-owned land. As OPB explains, most large data centers need those permits whether they are building on public or private property. The cloud, it turns out, has an address, and the neighbors would like a word.
Token prices keep falling and AI bills keep rising, and most of that money lands with two vendors. The fix isn't to spend less on AI. It's to stop renting all of it. // Executive Summary
The story most companies tell themselves about AI costs is that the market will fix them. Token prices have collapsed, so the bill should shrink on its own. That isn't what's happening. Usage is growing faster than prices fall, and the money is concentrating with a handful of frontier labs and the chip and cloud vendors behind them. Meanwhile, open models have closed most of the capability gap, and the hardware to run them now sits on a desk. The question for 2027 isn't how much to spend on AI. It's how much of your intelligence you want to rent.
Verizon is addressing customer pushback over an application it submitted to the Federal Communications Commission in August seeking approval to retire traditional copper landline phone service in parts of nine states. The carrier said it wants to discontinue the service because its copper infrastructure is outdated, costly, “too slow to meet modern needs,” and “vulnerable to damage and theft.” The change would affect roughly 277,000 business and residential legacy voice lines. Verizon says it will offer affected customers alternative service options, such as wireless or fiber, but critics warn the transition could harm some customers.
Amazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy has fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with opposition leading to hundreds of proposed and enacted moratoriums from New York to San Francisco. Meanwhile, a wave of startups is betting that consumers will hand AI agents access to their inboxes, files, and credit cards — if they can get websites to let them in.
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