CarolinaConnect Cooperative withdrew from the Federal Communications Commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) program. While CarolinaConnect Cooperative remains committed to delivering gigabit-tier broadband and voice services to rural communities in South Carolina, escalating construction costs to deploy broadband and voice services throughout its RDOF-funded area, combined with the relatively modest RDOF funding authorized for CarolinaConnect Cooperative, have led It to make this difficult decision. CarolinaConnect Cooperative will no longer receive RDOF support and may be subject to certain FCC noncompliance rules.

ConnectLA is taking a proactive approach to permitting coordination to help broadband projects move efficiently from planning to construction. By being intentional and well-prepared in the permitting process, projects are able to move forward more efficiently, helping Louisiana reach full coverage by 2028, if not sooner. Since March, ConnectLA has hosted more than 150 permitting coordination and outreach events, engaging nearly 600 permitting agency contacts. By focusing these events on documenting permitting requirements and resolving project-specific issues, internet service providers enter the permitting process fully equipped with the information and guidance needed to complete their projects successfully. With an average approval time of just six days, ISPs move quickly through the environmental review process, bringing them one step closer to construction and advancing progress across the state. Compared to the original 30-day expected turnaround, Bossier Parish is averaging a nine-day approval time, while Webster Parish is averaging roughly six to 15 days, demonstrating the impact of effective coordination.

One of the most common tasks required when building a new fiber network, particularly when burying fiber, is fixing the damage caused during the construction process. In the industry, we refer to this work as remediation, which means, in plain English, putting everything back to the way it was before the start of construction. There is a huge list of things that can go wrong and messes that can be made during the fiber construction process. There can be serious consequences for an internet service provider who bungles remediation. Bad local press can kill their marketing efforts, and in the most extreme cases, ISPs have lost construction permits.

Americans continue to demand more wireless data to power everything—from AI to wearables, digital streaming services, and more. In 2025 alone, Americans used a staggering 159.3 trillion megabytes of data—20 percent more data than was used the previous year and 39 percent more data than was used during the entire 4G decade. That growth reflects the increasingly central role wireless plays in everyday life, as data demand is expected to grow 4x by 2032. And the growth of AI will place an even greater strain on America’s wireless networks. AI is growing 3x faster than traditional wireless traffic and is expected to make up nearly a third of all broadband traffic by 2034. This traffic will upend traditional patterns, requiring more licensed spectrum and continued investment to support AI innovation across industries.

In what has been described as social media’s “Big Tobacco moment,” Meta announced a settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico over claims that the company endangered children with intentionally addictive social media platforms. The company behind Facebook and Instagram agreed to pay up to roughly $17 billion and make major product changes, including daily time limits and “enhanced age assurance measures.” Notably, Meta pays the full $17+ billion only if competitors TikTok and YouTube agree to enact similar changes. The settlement runs 130 pages. Two sentences recap what the states alleged, and 20 pages set out what Meta will do. Nothing joins one to the other. The agreement provides that Meta’s obligations "are explicitly limited to the Settling States" and cannot "establish a standard of care for, or serve as precedent in" any non-participating state or any other country. Meta agreed to change its products on the condition that nobody treat those changes as an answer to anything. 

Large language models that underpin AI chatbots have taken on an expanding role in shaping the information environment. Roughly 25 percent of American adults use chatbots daily including for information gathering and synthesis, entertainment, and other uses. LLMs also increasingly influence information flows in more subtle ways. They are now a primary tool for fact-checking and content moderation on social media platforms. Journalists, election officials, civil society organizations, and political campaigns increasingly turn to AI for vital tasks including research and content generation. While recent surveys show only a small proportion of American voters knowingly turn to AI chatbots for information about politics and elections, this share is likely to grow in the coming years.

Two seemingly contradictory realities are true at once:

1. Most people find AI only modestly useful, a more clever Google search.
2. Many people building AI or using it obsessively worry it could severely damage or destroy humanity.

We're living in an AI twilight zone. For many, the technology is simultaneously underwhelming in daily use and terrifying in its trajectory. The gap between these two realities helps explain why confusion and fear are exploding across politics, AI labs, and business.

Dr. Ruha Benjamin stressed that the people and companies behind the screen, not the technology itself, are responsible for the harms of artificial intelligence. Dr. Benjamin, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab, called tech industry leaders “the artificial intelligentsia” and warned that they want the public to believe democracy is outdated software. Drawing on Black intellectual tradition from W.E.B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler, she laid out a series of things the public needs to “unlearn,” from the myth that technology has a will of its own to the idea that innovation and social progress are the same thing. She pointed to community fights against data centers, cited research showing two out of three targeted projects have been blocked or delayed, and offered “Ancestral Intelligence” and “Abundant Imagination” as counterpoints to the tech industry’s version of AI. Journalist Richard Prince received the Everett C. Parker Award for decades of work holding the news industry accountable on race and representation. Prince was a member of The Washington Post’s “Metro Seven,” a group of seven Black journalists who filed the first known EEOC complaint of its kind against a newspaper in 1972. He created the “Journal-isms” column in 1991 and has tracked diversity in news media for more than three decades.