Surfing the Broadband Bit Stream

North Dakota has taken a major step forward with the recent execution of BEAD subgrantee agreements for hundreds of unserved locations.

The North Dakota Information Technology (NDIT) announced this week that it has finalized contracts with BEK Communications Cooperative and Midco to deliver broadband service to remaining unconnected areas in the state.

“With these agreements in place, North Dakota is among the first states in the nation to complete this critical step in the BEAD process, moving from planning to full execution of deployment partnerships,” said Brian Newby, broadband program director, in a release provided to Broadband Communities.

Messages between Shivon Zilis and Tesla executives reveal plans in 2017 to start a rival AI lab, potentially led by Altman or Demis Hassabis.

A few months before Elon Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in February 2018, he tried to recruit Sam Altman to join a “world-class AI lab” within Tesla. Musk went as far as offering the OpenAI CEO a Tesla board seat, according to emails and testimony presented in federal court on Wednesday during the Musk v. Altman trial. The emails were shown to a jury during the cross examination of Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI adviser and board member who is also the mother of four of Musk’s children.

Musk’s core claim in this lawsuit is that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman effectively stole a nonprofit, using the $38 million Musk invested to create a private company worth more than $800 billion today. On Wednesday, lawyers for Musk showed video depositions of former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, to raise concerns over Altman’s alleged history of deceit.

Media Matters has secured a complete and total victory in its case against the Federal Trade Commission (Media Matters v. FTC).

For more details, click here.

ALICIA MENENDEZ (CO-HOST): That illustrates your point. I want to make sure that we get to a really important story, and that has to do with you and your organization, Media Matters. You've secured a complete and total victory against the FTC.

I think you sit here with us a lot at this table. We talk about retribution. You yourself now have the experience of what it is like to have yourself as an individual, as an organization deal with this. 

The FTC withdrew its appeal of the preliminary injunction awarded to Media Matters to halt the FTC's retaliatory investigations. The FTC issued a broad civil investigative demand to Media Matters on May 25, demanding information on a wide variety of expressive matters, including information about newsgathering and editorial decisions, programs, policies and objectives, financial material, and much more.

What is the lesson you have learned coming out of this?

How David Sacks and the new tech right went full MAGA and captured Washington.

he courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as “Billionaires’ Row,” at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the All-In podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. He knew that other technology titans were coming around to the ex-president but remained in the closet. “And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that,” Sacks said on the podcast the week before the fundraiser. “And maybe it’ll create a preference cascade, where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth.”

A few years earlier, Sacks had described the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as an “insurrection” and pronounced Trump “disqualified” from ever again holding national office. “What Trump did was absolutely outrageous, and I think it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics,” he said on the podcast a few days after the event. “He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law.” Palihapitiya was more colloquial, calling Trump “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag.” These might seem like tricky positions to climb down from—but the path that leads from scathing denunciation through gradual accommodation to sycophantic embrace of Trump is a well-worn pilgrimage trail. The journey is less wearisome for self-mortifiers who never considered democracy (a word seldom spoken on the podcast) all that important in the first place. One prominent traveler who had already shown the way was a guest at the fundraiser—Senator J. D. Vance, whose attendance helped close the deal on his selection as Trump’s running mate. Any lingering awkwardness between the hosts and their guest of honor was dispelled by the fundraiser’s $12 million haul, much of it from cryptocurrency moguls.

Opportunist doesn’t really describe Sacks. He doesn’t come across as slippery or two-faced. There’s no evasive glance or roguish smile. He can argue at great length, in a steady sinal drone, with an aggressive debater’s ability to make an evidence-based case for any position he holds—but the position always happens to coincide with his benefit. The only consistent principle of his career is a ruthless devotion to self-interest. Sacks has identified as a “libertarian conservative” all of his adult life, but he has sought government intervention on behalf of his investments when it’s suited him. In 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Sacks demanded that the federal government bail out the uninsured deposits of start-up companies, much of the money from crypto firms. “Some libertarians care about the freedom of only one person,” Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur, investor, and right-wing provocateur, once said of his friend Sacks.

For the first time since late February, the NTIA has approved a BEAD final proposal… Oklahoma! This leaves Illinois and California as the final states needing NTIA blessing of final BEAD proposals.

As reported last month, the three states waiting for approval were all in the top-5 in terms of percentage of OG BEAD dollars allocated. For Oklahoma, 82.25% put them in the 5th spot for percent of funds allocated.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has been promising a top-to-bottom review of the Universal Service Fund (USF), and on April 29, the FCC released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that looks specifically at the High-Cost fund mechanisms that provide ongoing subsidies to ISPs operating in very rural markets. The High-Cost fund is the USF program that most people in the country (and even the industry) don’t understand.

Explore how Alaska is overcoming some of the toughest broadband challenges—from permafrost to remote island communities—and the strides it's making toward statewide connectivity.

With its enormous size, diverse terrain, and frozen ground, Alaska is a massive logistical nightmare when it comes to delivering broadband to its residents. Much of the state is covered by permafrost, making it nearly impossible to dig a trench for fiber-optic cables and many communities are on islands, such as the Aleutian Chain, or separated by river deltas. Connecting these communities requires miles of subsea fiber-optic cables, which are expensive to install and difficult to repair.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have partnered with asset managers to more aggressively market their enterprise AI products.

On Monday, Anthropic announced a joint venture focusing on deploying enterprise AI services. Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs will be founding partners in the new venture, which is backed by a group of VCs, hedge funds, and private equity firms, including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia Capital.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported news of the partnership, reported the new venture was valued at $1.5 billion, which includes a $300 million commitment each from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman.

New research suggests that reliance on AI assistants can have a negative impact on people’s ability to think and problem solve.

Using AI chatbots for even just for 10 minutes may have a shockingly negative impact on people’s ability to think and problem-solve, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA.

Researchers tasked people with solving various problems, including simple fractions and reading comprehension, through an online platform that paid them for their work. They conducted three experiments, each involving several hundred people. Some participants were given access to an AI assistant capable of solving the problem autonomously. When the AI helper was suddenly taken away, these people were significantly more likely to give up on the problem or flub their answers. The study suggests that widespread use of AI might boost productivity at the expense of developing foundational problem-solving skills.

The Reconnect grant program for rural broadband has had its funding restored as Congress continues through the budget process.

Funding for the ReConnect Loan and Grant Program in FY 2027 has been restored thanks to movement from the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies.

To close out April, the subcommittee approved their appropriations act for 2027, which provided $40 million for the ReConnect program, as was highlighted in the subcommittee’s bill summary.

Presenters at a Clearfield Fiber to the Future event argued passionately about the importance of ubiquitous broadband.

We sometimes hear the term “burning soul” in connection with big goals. Big goals need burning souls — people who are passionate about the goal; good at articulating why you should be, too; and willing to put in the hard work to achieve the goal. Take ubiquitous broadband, for example.

People who read Telecompetitor tend to share this goal: to get high-speed broadband to as many people as possible in order to better peoples’ lives. Some people who share this goal are what I would consider burning souls. I had a chance to connect with some of them at an industry event in Minneapolis last week organized by optical fiber manufacturer Clearfield.

The event, billed as “Fiber to the Future,” brought together people from network operators, government, media, and the supply chain. Here are a few of the things we heard from the burning souls in attendance.

Almost 50% of Americans don’t want data centers in their neighborhoods, according to a new poll that shows sharp generational and political divide.

Nearly one in two Americans would rather not live near an artificial intelligence (AI) data center, according to a new Redfin-commissioned survey that highlights mounting “not in my backyard” tensions just as cities look to accommodate both housing growth and the infrastructure needed to power AI.

The poll, conducted by Ipsos in November 2025 and released May 4 by Redfin, found that 47% of US residents oppose the construction of an AI data center in their neighborhood, while just 38% said they would support one.

The survey showed that support for nearby AI data centers skews by generation.

Starlink is delivering median download speeds of 100 Mbps or higher in nearly every U.S. state. Learn how rising speeds and lower latency are widening its lead over HughesNet and Viasat.

Key takeaways:

• According to Ookla Speedtest® data from the second half of 2025, Speedtest users on Starlink in every state but Alaska were able to get median download speeds of 100 Mbps or higher, moving it from a last-ditch option to a viable competitor for broadband service in many areas. This is more than double the number of states in 2H 2024 when users in just 23 states were able to get median download speeds of 100 Mbps or higher.
• Starlink users in 22 states were able to get median upload speeds of 20 Mbps or higher, an improvement over the 2H of 2024 when users in no states were able to get 20 Mbps in upload speeds. This is a significant milestone because the FCC designates 20 Mbps upload speeds as the minimum threshold for broadband connectivity. 

The analytic company IDC says the U.S. economy will be generating 394 trillion zettabytes of data annually by 2028 (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes). The majority of the energy used in data centers today is for storing some of this data in an accessible format. We don’t try to make all data available, and about 20% of the data we generate today is considered to be “hot data” that AI systems might want to draw on quickly. The remaining 80% of data is “cold data”, which we don’t put in data center storage, but which we also don’t discard, since it might still be of use in the future.

Today, hot data is largely stored on hard drives in data centers.

In a high-profile lawsuit, Elon Musk alleges OpenAI shifted from a safety-first nonprofit to profit-driven operations, citing emails and constrained expert testimony about AGI risks.

Friday, May 8th, 2026, is exactly one year since the President canceled the Digital Equity Act (DEA). Join us from May 8-June 8 for a DEA Month of Action to raise awareness on the community and organizational impact of DEA's cancellation.

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - The Rio Grande Valley Broadband Coalition has praised the City of Brownsville for securing $21.9 million from the Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO) for its blazing-fast fiber internet service.

BDO, which is administered through the Texas Comptroller’s Office, awarded more than $113 million in grants under the Texas Middle Mile program. The program aims to expand broadband availability, strengthen network resiliency, enhance affordability, and support public safety and emergency preparedness.

Brownsville’s grant was the second highest awarded. The total cost of Brownsville's middle mile project is $23,426,016. It has been awarded $21,926,016 by BDO. This represents around 93.6 percent of the total cost. The funding will allow it to add another 131 miles of fiber in Cameron County. 

We sat down with Connect Humanity to learn more about how community-focused internet service providers function; the importance of the U.S. Treasury’s grant to help Connect Humanity become certified as a CDFI; how Connect Humanity’s model has shifted in response to the current funding environment; what the organization is learning about the ripple effect of internet connectivity; the enormous economic growth unleashed by affordable and reliable internet; the role of philanthropy in catalyzing change and piloting new initiatives; and the urgency of finding alternative and sustainable funding sources that spread the costs across an ecosystem of beneficiaries.