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September 2024

Washington sees AI everywhere

Top officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, the National Economic Council, and private industry all dropped by downtown Washington for the POLITICO AI & Tech Summit on September 17. And with the first presidential election of the generative AI era a mere seven weeks away, much of their attention was turned to ensuring its security and trustworthiness. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) described how artificial intelligence demands a response from each sector of government.

The End of the Chevron Doctrine Is Bad for Business

Two recent Supreme Court decisions produced sweeping changes to how regulation works in the United States, shifting power from agencies to the courts. Investment will now take place against the backdrop of the “judicial veto,” where a wide range of potential litigants and sympathetic judges will decide which regulations actually go into effect, and when. According to conventional wisdom, scaling back the regulatory state will help businesses. However, the court’s rulings will suppress business investment in three unintended ways.

“We Take ‘Internet for All’ Seriously”: Alaska’s Broadband Director on Getting to 100%

A few years ago, an assessment of Alaska’s broadband needs suggested an investment of nearly $2 billion would be needed to bring high-speed connections to everyone in the nation’s largest state. The National Telecommunications and Information Association (NTIA) awarded Alaska just over $1 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program funds.

Social Media and News Fact Sheet

Digital sources have become an important part of Americans’ news diets—with social media playing a crucial role, particularly for younger adults. Overall, just over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media, up slightly compared with the last few years. Facebook and YouTube outpace all other social media sites as places where Americans regularly get news. About a third of U.S.

“Worst connected” Detroit and Cleveland are also “most improved”

Per the most recent American Community Survey data, among cities with 100,000 or more households, the two worst-connected cities, Detroit (MI) and Cleveland (OH), have also had the biggest percentage reductions in households without wireline broadband connections since 2019. Detroit added more than 41,000 households with cable, fiber or DSL subscriptions between 2019 and 2023, even while its total household count shrank by about 12,000; this took the city’s percentage of households without wireline from 46.3% down to 32.2%.

A Tale of Two Grant Programs

Pretty much everybody in the industry agrees that the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant process has taken too long. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act legislation that authorized BEAD was signed into law in November 2021. A few states are now opening a grant portal to accept BEAD grant applications—nearly three years after the legislation was passed. Not all grant programs have taken this long. An interesting contrast to BEAD is another huge-dollar federal grant program, the Capital Project Fund (CPF).

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