Texas’ Democratic candidate for attorney general says, if elected, he would investigate whether SpaceX got preferential treatment in receiving $109 million in state broadband grants. The remarks by Nathan Johnson, a state senator, come after the state revised its broadband grant process following the Trump administration’s restructuring of a $42.45 billion federal broadband expansion initiative. 

Reps Valerie Foushee (D-NC) and Greg Casar (D-TX) introduced H.R. 9619, the People-First Chatbot Act, comprehensive legislation to establish strong federal safeguards and protections for Americans interacting with artificial intelligence chatbots. The People-First Chatbot Act would:

• Prohibit companies from using minors’ chat logs or personal data to train AI chatbots. For adult users, companies may not use chat logs or personal data for training without affirmative consent.

• Require companies to disable harmful AI chatbot design features for minors.

• Limit the use of users’ personal data and chat logs for targeted advertising, profiling, customized ads, and sale.

• Give users the right to access and delete retained chat logs and personal data.

• Require AI chatbot providers to clearly disclose when a user is interacting with an AI chatbot rather than a human.

• Prohibit AI chatbot providers from implying that chatbot outputs are provided by, endorsed by, or equivalent to those provided by licensed healthcare, legal, accounting, or financial professionals.

• Require monthly safety assessments of AI chatbots for risks of harms like suicide, emotional dependence, and compulsive usage.

• Prevent companies from providing law enforcement access to chat logs without a warrant.

• Require disclosure when a company uses an AI chatbot for customer service and give consumers the right to be transferred to a human operator upon request.

• Establish strong user protections and accountability by authorizing the Federal Trade Commission, State attorneys general, and individuals through a private right of action to enforce violations of the Act and seek recourse for harms.

For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue. Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search. The content delivery network Cloudflare, which hosts roughly one-fifth of the websites in the world, recently gave Google an ultimatum. Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise. “We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”

Players in the broadband industry are increasingly concerned about the impact that SpaceX’s Starlink could have on their businesses. Recently, New Street Research (NSR), working with Recon Analytics’ data, found that SpaceX’s Starlink continues to get close to half of its gross adds from small rural broadband providers and customers that are new to broadband. “New customers” refers to subscribers who say they have not had broadband in the past. NSR Analyst David Barden said, “So far, we haven’t seen any major impact on the wired broadband operators in the U.S. mostly because Starlink has been focused on rural markets where customers have few alternatives. As Starlink increases its total capacity with V3 satellite launches, its ability to lower prices and target more incumbent broadband operator customers will grow.”