Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Rep Jim Clyburn (D-SC), and over 40 of their colleagues called on Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to fully implement the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program as Congress intended to connect all Americans to high-quality, affordable internet. This letter comes as the Department of Commerce announced substantial changes to the implementation of the BEAD program. The legislators urged Secretary Lutnick to give states "the full funding and flexibility they retained prior to the issuance of the restructuring notice." They wrote, "As reflected in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s congressional findings, high-quality internet access is a requirement to fully participate in the world, and the BEAD program is our once-in-a century opportunity to finish closing the digital divide. We fear this opportunity would be squandered by the restructuring notice and its changes to coverage, quality, and affordability. We therefore urge you to implement the BEAD program in accordance with the best reading of the statute so we can make high-quality internet accessible and affordable for all Americans."

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. Then I want to open the floor to your reactions—positive or negative. I don’t have time to hit every change, so let me touch on six of the biggest ones. Optimists believe that LEO satellite service and unlicensed fixed wireless services are unlikely to meet that standard, and in some cases might not even meet the basic speed and latency requirements. LEO service suffers from severe congestion problems, resulting in long waiting lists and high congestion fees, while unlicensed fixed wireless is dependent on the availability of unlicensed spectrum, which is no certainty given recent talks on Capitol Hill and at the FCC. 

[Gigi Sohn is the Executive Director of the American Association for Public Broadband and the Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate.]

The reverberations from the last-minute changes to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program continue. But, since the new BEAD plans were unveiled, industry expert Blair Levin — policy adviser to New Street Research — has had time to refine his assessment. “Our initial reaction was that the new rules would shift funds from fiber to satellite, a negative for wired providers…We still think that but in talking to numerous stakeholders, that magnitude of the shift may be less than we initially thought,” says Levin. Levin reviewed the impact of the rules and provided a new analysis. The process, he says, may be chaotic in a similar manner to the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction. He also suggested that states may be able to salvage more of their original BEAD plans than was originally thought likely. That, by no measure, means that the changes will be easy to navigate. 

On June 6, 2025, mere hours after Elon Musk started his tweet war with the president, the Commerce Department released its long-awaited revisions to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. This $42 billion broadband-deployment plan was part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that Congress passed in November 2021. As expected, the Trump administration’s revisions radically overhauled what had been a rural broadband-deployment plan focused on building fiber networks—and turned it into a free money dispenser for Elon Musk’s satellite-broadband company, Starlink. Had this billionaire bromance fallen apart a few weeks earlier, we might have seen a less sweeping revision of this once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure program. But now that this revised plan is out there, analysts everywhere—operating on the premise that Trump-administration corruption is a given—are trying to predict how and to what degree the Trump team will enforce these changes designed to unjustly enrich Musk, a man the president reportedly called “a big time drug addict” as the two traded barbs. 

Perhaps no one should be surprised that, in the age of streaming, videoconferencing, and multi-player gaming, along with a sprinkle of virtual reality, average and median home broadband usage continues to climb. However, it was perhaps somewhat unexpected that the rate of growth declined of late, according to OpenVault, which puts out its quarterly Broadband Insights report based on aggregated and anonymized data from an array of broadband operators. But it may be too early to call this a trend. OpenVault's Q1 2025 report found that average downstream and upstream usage accelerated a bit, for a combined 663 gigabytes versus 606GB in the year-ago period. OpenVault said this rise in the usage rate (17.6 percent for upstream and 8.9 percent for the downstream) was the biggest jump since 2022—just a couple years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic caused millions to work and school from home.

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. The Big Tech firm had argued that the works had been used to develop a transformative technology, which was fair “irrespective” of how it acquired the works. Judge Chhabria warned that his decision reflected the authors’ failure to properly make their case. “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” he said. “It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”