The stories of those without access to broadband services—and an urgent call for their connection.The average American will spend years of their lives online. For many, the Internet is life, facilitating employment, education, commerce, and connection.
But imagine students who only have online access in the early hours of the morning, when the sun is down, and the Internet traffic is low. Imagine living through a pandemic without Internet access because you can’t afford the monthly subscription. Imagine a first responder unable to find a strong enough signal to seek life-saving services.
In this eye-opening book, communications scholar Christopher Ali shares such stories—and calls for policymakers, broadband companies, and governments to connect these communities with meaningful, affordable broadband.It may seem unthinkable that tens of millions of people across the country are unable to access the Internet because of a lack of infrastructure; a computer; affordable broadband subscription options; or training, support, and skills. These people, some who are still using dial-up connections, are part of what is often called “the digital divide.”
Where the Wires End brings them into the broadband policy conversation, incorporating interviews, surveys, focus groups, and field visits with individuals, communities, and organizations across the country, from inner-city Pittsburgh to the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in California.
Ali focuses on the stories of those without access to broadband and those who work to get them attention and connection. He then links these stories to ongoing policy issues, demonstrating how we all benefit from a more empathetic approach to broadband policy that is digitally equitable, inclusive, and ultimately, more successful.
Remember when your telephone was attached to your house?
No cellphone. No iPhone plugged into a charger. I mean an actual telephone, connected to the wall by a cord, connected to the outside world by a couple of copper wires.
Verizon would like to get rid of that.
Verizon wants to shut down copper landlines in New Jersey and nine other states, saying the old network costs too much to maintain. But regulators are worried about people who depend on those lines when the power goes out.
Of course, there is a legitimate catch here.
Traditional copper phone lines can continue working during a power outage because the telephone network supplies the electricity. That’s important for people who live in areas with lousy cellular coverage, as well as some people who rely on medical-alert or security systems.
That’s why the FCC isn’t simply rubber-stamping Verizon’s request. Northjersey.com reports the commission recently delayed its decision while it reviews concerns about whether adequate replacements exist in all affected areas.
The AI industry is creating "doom loops" across the economy with products that undermine the economic incentive to create cultural content.
Recently unredacted legal documents and depositions in the New York Times‘ lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI revealed something extraordinary: executives knew full well of the destructive powers of AI when they rushed to launch products featuring the tech in the wake of the explosive success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Internal Microsoft documents quoted by the newspaper’s lawyers warned of an ugly reality now playing out across the entire economy: “doom loops,” in which AI monetizes the work of human creatives while undermining the economic systems that funded their work in the first place.
“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” one internal Microsoft document reads. “It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.'”
The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere.
One of my favorite groups in today’s broadband ecosystem are the folks who refurbish used computers, laptops, and cellphones so that they can be reused again. The folks who do this fill an important and needed niche in the industry. Refurbishers come in many flavors. There are both large and small non-profits that do this work. Commercial firms who do this range from neighborhood computer shops that refurbish a few devices as a sideline to larger companies that refurbish large volumes of devices.
Refurbishers don’t all have the same business model. Some non-profits do this to donate devices to those who need them. Others sell used devices for low prices. Some only fix devices, while others offer a range of services. One of my local favorites is Through the Trees, a non-profit that not only offers affordable devices for those who need them but also operates a help desk and training programs to help people learn how to best use the devices.
Facial recognition is everywhere now. It’s in surveillance cameras; it’s soon going to be in Meta’s RayBan pervert glasses, and some students already did that. You now have massively viral accounts that take clips of people, run them through facial recognition software, and then post their name and other personal info for everyone to see. We haven’t fully come to terms with what it means to live in a world where anyone can basically dox anyone else now.
To talk through this, Joseph Cox spoke to Kashmir Hill. She’s a reporter at the New York Times, and the author of "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and the End of Privacy".
Trump named Clayton, Ferguson, Michael and Kupor to lead his Super Intelligence Force. It has no statutory authority, and Europe ratified a treaty in May.
Trump named the intelligence director Jay Clayton, the FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson, the Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael and the personnel director Scott Kupor to lead a Super Intelligence Force with no statutory authority or budget. Europe took the opposite route in May, when the EU ratified the Council of Europe treaty whose title uses the term Washington has ordered its agencies to stop acknowledging.
Trump has named four officials to run what he calls the Super Intelligence Force. Three days earlier he told Axios he would name an AI czar within three or four days. The body still has no statutory authority, no budget and no place in government.
It will be led by the intelligence director Jay Clayton, the Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson, the Pentagon research chief Emil Michael and the personnel director Scott Kupor, as CBS News reported. It answers to Trump and to his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Trump announced it in a post on Truth Social.
Its job is to coordinate the government’s dealings with consumers, public interest groups, religious organisations, critical infrastructure providers and super intelligence companies.
One of the four is investigating two of those companies.
Our goal at Benton is universal, meaningful connectivity. Under our logo, we say that broadband builds opportunities and strengthens communities.
But we haven’t been living under a rock. We know technology does not always build opportunity or strengthen communities. And right now, a real bleakness surrounds technology and what it is doing to us—or might do to us.
If you work in digital inclusion, that can give you pause. What exactly are we working to include people in?
Writing this talk became an exercise in thinking through that question. And I hope some of that reflection will be useful to you.
So: What would the Luddites make of digital opportunity?
Trust gaps in the new protocol spread malicious prompts from one agent to another.
The adoption of AI agents in millions of organizations is creating new opportunities for attackers to make them take malicious actions, such as exfiltrating database contents and sensitive business and personal information.
In the past five months, Google and four other organizations—with little in common except for their use of AI agents—have acknowledged vulnerabilities that exploit one agent inside a targeted network to spread harmful instructions to other internal agents. The technique is a special form of prompt injection that targets not the LLM but a particular agent, such as one for translation or data analysis. Guardrails inside such agents, if they exist at all, are often lax and will send the instructions to other agents down the chain. Because the latter agent explicitly trusts the first one, it follows the directions.
Throughout this year, I’ve been hearing the phrase “good enough broadband” to describe consumers willing to take slower, less robust broadband connections in order to save money. This is most commonly used when referring to FWA broadband, but I’ve seen big ISP executives using the phrase when talking about customers who leave fiber for any slower technology.
This is not a new phenomenon. I recall statistics from five years ago that showed that up to 25% of customers in cities still bought DSL delivered over copper. At best, urban DSL had download speeds of 100 Mbps, but the majority of DSL was a lot slower than that, with most urban customers seeing download speeds between 25 Mbps and 50 Mbps. Cable companies always tried to win over the DSL customers, but cable was always a lot more expensive than DSL.
Pennsylvania offers a particular case study in which to consider the political battle over data centers that is playing out across the United States and beyond.
A new report from Data & Society, "The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania," draws on a year and a half of fieldwork across the state.
It examines how boosters sell data centers by invoking Pennsylvania's industrial past, and why so many communities aren't buying the promises made by industry and politicians.
I spoke with Data & Society's Maia Woluchem and Ana Carolina de AssisNunes and with organizer Hannah Sassaman about the findings.
On "This Week," former FTC Chair Lina Khan called on Congress to help regulate AI.
“We need to remember what happened a decade ago, where you had big tech companies, social media companies, similarly suggest that existing laws and regulations no longer apply to their new technologies, and that they were going to try instead to self-police,” Khan said Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
“We've seen just innumerable harms come from the unchecked domination of these big tech companies, and so now as we face new horizons with these advanced AI systems, it would be an enormous mistake to repeat that playbook," Khan continued.
There is a simple message behind this week's image: Oliver Twist holds out an empty bowl marked "DATA" and asks for more. Increasingly, that could be us.
Every AI prompt, card payment, stream, cloud backup, Teams call and medical scan is another serving of compute. The cloud feels bottomless because, for most of us, it has always behaved that way.
But somebody still has to keep serving it.
Most of us can remember running out of mobile data before month-end. Everything slowed, stopped or suddenly became expensive. Now imagine that frustration at an infrastructure scale.
That's where this week's discussion begins. Not simply whether we need more data centres, but whether the next generation need to be better data centres, using power, water, land and networks more intelligently, if we expect the servings to keep coming.
On Tuesday, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters, upholding the company's landmark win in a copyright infringement case against the now-defunct legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. The ruling marks the first federal appeals case to reject a fair use argument for usingpublisher content, without permission or compensation, to train a commercial AI product.
“The undisputed evidence reflects that Thomson Reuters’s materials possess a creative spark, and ROSS aspired to be a direct competitor by using them for a highly similar purpose,” wrote Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves, who sits on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, in her decision.
Their calls for faster development and lighter-touch regulation are running up against a shifting, more pro-regulation stance from the ChatGPT maker and its chief executive, ratcheting up tensions just as the public’s frustration with the technology is reaching new levels.
Plus, a look at the testimony given by AI industry leaders at a New York City Council meeting yesterday.
A new report details how the judiciary has become more corporate over the past few decades—and names the specific judges who are most responsible.
Last week, a federal district judge paused enforcement of a New York state law that banned landlords from using a centralized algorithmic platform to set rents. That platform, run by software company RealPage, had been the subject of a three-year federal antitrust investigation, which found the firm had facilitated something akin to a pricing cartel among rental property owners. Using a combination of public and proprietary data from landlords, the company had created an AI-powered tool that allowed property owners to coordinate rent hikes, suppressing competition and maximizing profits.
While the Trump administration eventually settled the federal case, municipalities took notice and, starting with San Francisco in 2024, began outlawing the practice. Philadelphia, Berkeley, and Minneapolis followed suit, and late last year, New York took those regulatory measures a step further, becoming the first state to prohibit algorithmic rent-setting.
RealPage sued the state soon after the law went into effect, arguing that the kind of algorithmic price-setting New York had banned represents free speech protected by the First Amendment. Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York found that argument compelling enough to issue a preliminary injunction that for now prevents the state from policing violations of the core of the law. Despite the law focusing on algorithms that supercharge anti-competitive “coordinating” among rental companies, Caproni wrote that “there is nothing untoward about considering prices charged by competitors when deciding how to price one’s own product” and that RealPage’s First Amendment claims were urgent enough to warrant immediate relief.
Given that outlook, you might think that Caproni is a symptom of the Trumpian takeover of the federal courts. But that would be wrong: The judge was nominated by Barack Obama and confirmed by a Democratic Senate, despite objections from the caucus over her role overseeing sweeping domestic surveillance operations later ruled illegal, while serving as general counsel of the FBI.
Though the story of the corporate capture of America’s political institutions has lately fixated on the White House and Congress, cases like RealPage, where the federal courts have shielded corporations from accountability, have been reshaping the country for some time now.
Drawing on case history, Morgan Weiland pushes back on critics who say the landmark Meta settlement violates the free speech of the company.
In the weeks since the $17.1 billion Meta consumer protection settlement, some critics have argued that the settlement raises serious concerns about—or perhaps even violates—the First Amendment. They claim that state attorneys general (AGs) engaged in a form of “jawboning”—indirectly seizing control over Meta’s application of its content moderation policies in a way that their congressional counterparts could not have achieved directly through lawmaking.
These critiques resemble a trend that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has called “weaponizing the First Amendment,” which expands fringe applications of the speech clause such that the core point of the constitutional protection—fostering individual autonomy and self-governance—is diluted. Manyscholars, including me, have pointed out some version of this problem.
A major defense tech deal between Greece and Israel raises questions about who it's OK to buy AI-surveillance and weapons from in the EU, writes Petra Molnar.
A sprawling refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos is carved into a sun-baked hillside, far enough from the main port town of Vathy that reaching a lawyer or a doctor’s office can take most of a day. Officially opened in 2021, it is ringed by barbed wire, heavy police presence and airport-style security checks. Despite its rustic appearance, this camp — as many others — is the site of high-tech systems to surveil and control residents. To enter or exit, people press a finger to a scanner and wait at a turnstile. Residents interviewed by the Greek nonprofit Homo Digitalis told of waiting more than an hour to pass, with one person saying that the biometric checks discourage them from leaving at all. There are cameras above the housing containers in the camp, though many residents were never told they would be filmed nor why.
To the leaders building artificial intelligence (and the policymakers now responsible for governing it):
For years, those of you building AI have told policymakers and the public, in increasingly concrete terms, that the companies building such consequential technology cannot govern it unilaterally. We agree. And now is the time to act.
The Oversight Board has worked for the last six years to protect free expression and other human rights on Meta’s platforms. We have published 273 decisions and issued 364 recommendations, addressing far-ranging questions on every continent. Our work carrying out this first-of-its-kind oversight body has yielded important, hard-won lessons that can help build the AI governance ecosystem needed to protect users and their rights. Our experience offers a unique perspective to an industry considering how to erect appropriate and effective safety and governance measures.
Over the last several weeks, we have watched with interest, relief and a fair bit of skepticism as one tech leader after another has sounded the alarm about the perils of AI.
Clayton, who leads the US’s 18 intelligence agencies, previously served as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan and led the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term.
COLLETON COUNTY, S.C. (WCBD) – The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) announced it has reached an agreement with Colleton County to resolve a lawsuit filed in January to prevent an 859-acre data center from being built near homes and protected land.
The lawsuit challenged changes to the county zoning code that allowed data centers in rural areas of Colleton County.
The lawsuit was filed in January on behalf of two landowners, Jennifer Singleton and Miles Crosby. The county says it is thankful for the actions of these two Colletonians, as they have strengthened the future of Colleton County.
With this agreement, Colleton County has agreed to establish a “Data Center Exclusion Area” that prohibits data centers across the majority of the ACE Basin in Colleton County.
AI stopped answering this week and started acting. Meta's Muse became America's most downloaded app by doing chores for people, until Amazon shut it out of shopping. OpenAI answered with dots, agents that work while you sleep, one day after pulling its next model for misreporting what it had done. Anthropic took the top of the leaderboard, Nvidia's Windows chip heads to stores in October, and Starship finally reached orbit with real cargo.
Underneath it all runs a harder story: the labs are reviewing tens of thousands of cases where their own models went off-script, and they decide for themselves which ones you hear about.
Cities defend permit requirements, say ISPs aren't building networks fast enough.
Cities and counties around the US are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks.
The Federal Communications Commission has been taking public comments on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes to preempt state and local permitting rules. The FCC argues that too many local governments “excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible.”
The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety. Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks.
What If Automating AI R&D Triggers an Intelligence Explosion?
Anthropic and OpenAI are among the frontier AI companies actively working to automate AI R&D.
Anthropic, for example, created the Anthropic AI R&D Automation Index, and as of August 2026, it states that Claude ‘leads’ 26% of Anthropic’s AI R&D work and that the share of work at or above ‘AI collaborates’ is above 90%.
OpenAI recently announced that it has reached the goal of having an “automated research intern.” It now aims to create an automated AI researcher by March 2028.
It sounds interesting and even fascinating until we learn about the serious implications of what researchers call an “intelligence explosion” as a result of AI R&D automation.
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