Research

2026 will be remembered as a seminal year for local news. The number of news desert counties in the U.S. ballooned by 26, the largest single-year rise by far since Medill began keeping records five years ago. There are now 238 news desert counties. Newspapers closed at an escalating rate of nearly three every week. More than 425 newspapers changed hands, 75 percent more than in the prior year. The newspaper industry lost more than 8 percent of its workforce between 2024 and 2025. On top of that, several major local news publishers implemented large-scale layoffs in 2026.

In 1996, Congress directed the Federal Communications Commission to ensure that schools and libraries could obtain advanced telecommunications services at affordable rates. The FCC established the E-Rate program to carry out that mandate. Three decades later, E-Rate spends between $2 billion and $3 billion each year on subsidized internet service and network infrastructure—and has developed into a complex system with intermediary consultants who consume hundreds of millions of dollars annually to assist in accessing federal support for internet bills.

Digitunity recently released its National Computer Ownership Index, a new benchmark tracking computer ownership across the United States using American Community Survey data. The Index finds that 32.9 million people in the U.S. lack access to a large-screen computer, including 25.8 million who rely exclusively on smartphones. While overall computer access has improved since 2016, the findings highlight persistent gaps in access to the devices needed for employment, education, healthcare, and other essential activities.

Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program projects will deploy 271,782 miles of buried fiber, 57.5 percent of all BEAD fiber miles. Before burying that fiber, internet service providers will have to make sure they do not disrupt other infrastructure that might already be in the ground. To do this, ISPs will have to navigate the utility locate process, which hinges on owners of that infrastructure—typically electric, water, and gas utilities; municipalities; and other state or local entities—knowing where their lines are buried and accurately marking them.

U.S. fiber broadband deployment is accelerating, and CostQuest’s newest fiber focus report offers a forward-looking view of where fiber coverage is expanding, who is building it, and how federal funding is reshaping the competitive map. Fiber is now serving 58.7 percent more U.S. homes and businesses than it did four years ago, with more than 26.6 million Broadband Serviceable Locations gaining fiber access since Version 1 of the Fabric, including 6 percent growth in just the past six months.

On August 18, 2026, OpenAI announced ChatGPT for Teens, promising "stronger built-in safety protections," including parental notifications for dangerous chats, a Study mode that can be controlled by parents, and reduced "friend"-like behavior. We tested more than 4,000 prompts before and after the Teen mode launch and rated ChatGPT an Unacceptable Risk for all children under 18. We call on OpenAI to pause marketing the product and to keep teens off of ChatGPT until it can offer a safe, developmentally appropriate experience.

Governments spend billions of dollars to bring broadband to places that lack it. This report asks how much of the new service in the places six programs came from the subsidies, and how much would have arrived anyway. We compare the areas each program funded with similar areas it did not fund, track both over time, and call the difference the program’s effect. The main measure is access, whether a location can buy at least 100/20 Mbps from a wired or licensed wireless provider.

While the Internet has become essential infrastructure for modern life, online linguistic diversity remains limited, with only about ten languages accounting for most content despite more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. As artificial intelligence accelerates the pace of digital interaction, this concentration threatens to deepen linguistic homogenization at an unprecedented scale, quietly excluding billions of people from the opportunities the Internet provides.

There is ample evidence of jurisdictions adopting a variety of egregious permitting practices, spanning fees, requirements, timelines, and approvals. The pervasiveness of these practices, including across jurisdiction type and size/density, and the resulting economic harm to wireline deployment make them worth intervention. Our economic modeling identified the permitting practices with the greatest negative impact on wireline deployment.

As social media platforms have become an important part of the information environment around the world, the view that social media is harming democracy has become more common. A new 37-nation Pew Research Center survey finds that in most countries where trend data is available, the share of the public who believes social media is bad for democracy has increased significantly from 2022 or 2023 to now. Views about social media’s impact are particularly negative in the United States, where 64% of adults say it is bad for democracy.