National Telecommunications and Information Administration Assistant Secretary Arielle Roth recently made a speech at the Hudson Institute that outlined her policy positions related to reshaping the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. The changes to BEAD were initiated by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and are now being finalized and implemented by Assistant Secretary Roth. The bottom-line impact of the changes will be to cut the amount of spending from the BEAD grant program roughly in half, with the savings returned to the Treasury. Assistant Secretary Roth says that the changes are not just about saving money. Her position is that the cuts being made are to make sure that the government doesn’t distort or sabotage the pace of technological innovation. I know Assistant Secretary Roth is looking for a good argument for awarding all of the locations in a rural county to satellite instead of fiber—but this argument is not it. The truth is that the NTIA changes to BEAD are only about saving money. NTIA could have completed the BEAD grant award on the same timeline by deciding to spend the full $42.5 billion, but they chose not to. They whacked the spending in half and are now searching for a clever way to justify their choices. I can’t think of a more ludicrous argument than one that says that spending more BEAD money on fiber would somehow sabotage the overall pace of broadband technology innovation for the country.

Two projects totaling $5.4 million for high-speed internet expansion in northeastern Oklahoma were officially launched in Craig County (OK) by the Oklahoma Broadband Office and internet service provider The Junction Internet. The projects, funded through $2.7 million in federal grants administered by the OBO coupled with $2.7 million in matching contributions from Junction, will connect 337 homes and businesses with broadband internet using fixed wireless technology. The awards were made in 2024 by the Oklahoma Broadband Governing Board for high-speed internet expansion in Craig and Nowata counties.

There are many, many maps of New York City. There are the decor maps, sold on Amazon, and the tourist maps, which focus, erroneously, only on Manhattan. There’s the iconic subway map. There are the Eater and Grubhub maps, which tell us where to eat. And then there’s the map that really matters: the official legal map for the city, which quite literally rules the streets, complete with boundaries and widths. It’s also the map that doesn’t currently exist, at least in one singular and easy-to-use form. That’s changing, though. On November 4, New Yorkers appeared poised to approve Proposal 5, a measure that will push the city to create a unified official map representing its five boroughs for the first time. The effort should help officials finally catch up with unification efforts, which began more than a century ago in 1898, when areas throughout modern-day Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and the Bronx were combined to form one city government. 

Vladimir Lenin is said to have warned that all societies are three square meals from chaos. But in the modern world, it is only a Wi-Fi signal that separates us from anarchy. Every aspect of our lives is reliant on computers and the internet, and when they fail, they do so with disorientating speed. This became abundantly clear during power cuts across Spain and Portugal. Traffic signals went dark and roads clogged, while emergency services couldn’t take calls and commerce ground to a halt. Even networks in Morocco and Greenland suffered because they rely on servers in Spain. Surely governments around the world have well-oiled plans in place to deal with catastrophic internet outages? They don’t appear to, says Valerie Aurora, a legend of the tech world known for her contributions to open-source operating system Linux. Concerns that no such plans exist have driven Aurora and about a dozen cybersecurity experts, hackers, radio hobbyists, and lawyers to a 15th-century café in Nieuwmarkt square in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on a radiant Sunday afternoon. I’ve come to meet them, and have no idea what to expect. What I discover is a group of dedicated volunteers drawing up their own plans to reboot the internet in the event of a disaster. The world’s only Internet Resiliency Club is currently stress-testing the technology that could restore network connectivity—and enjoying coffee and cake while they do so.

California’s tech companies, the epicenter of the state’s economy, sent politicians a loud message: Back down from restrictive artificial intelligence regulation or they’ll leave. The tactic appeared to have worked, activists said, because some politicians weakened or scrapped guardrails to mitigate AI’s biggest risks. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) rejected a bill aimed at making companion chatbots safer for children after the tech industry fought it. In his veto message, the governor raised concerns about placing broad limits on AI, which has sparked a massive investment spree and created new billionaires overnight around the San Francisco Bay Area. Assembly Bill 1064 would have barred companion chatbot operators from making these AI systems available to minors unless the chatbots weren’t “foreseeably capable” of certain conduct, including encouraging a child to engage in self-harm. Gov Newsom said he supported the goal, but feared it would unintentionally bar minors from using AI tools and learning how to use technology safely. The bill’s veto was a blow to child safety advocates who had pushed it through the state Legislature and a win for tech industry groups that fought it. In social media ads, groups such as TechNet had urged the public to tell the governor to veto the bill because it would harm innovation and lead to students falling behind in school.