June 2025

I’m going to talk about something that I imagine will be discussed at about half of the panels here—the Commerce Department’s June 6 Policy Notice laying out the Administration’s new requirements for the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. While I’m sure that some of you are steeped in the details of the Policy Notice, I’m guessing that many of you aren’t. My plan is to walk you through the highlights and give my spin.

Meta’s use of millions of books to train its artificial intelligence models has been judged “fair” by a federal court, in a win for tech companies that use copyrighted materials to develop AI. The case, brought by about a dozen authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey, challenged how the $1.4tn social media giant used a library of millions of online books, academic articles and comics to train its Llama AI models. Meta’s use of these titles is protected under copyright law’s fair use provision, San Francisco District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled.