The Trump administration's changes to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program have disqualified hundreds of thousands of locations — including homes, businesses and community buildings — from receiving internet access. And the program's new technology-neutral approach will also shift a large portion of the federal funds toward satellite internet companies, including Elon Musk's Starlink, that cost less to build but have more uneven service than underground fiber optic cable. That means households and businesses that were looking forward to reliable, high-speed internet will no longer get support from the BEAD program. While some experts were initially skeptical about the program's goals, every state utilized its allocated funds to develop plans to provide high-speed fiber internet to nearly every home and business in the country, said Christopher Mitchell, the director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Most states are expected to get started on deployment projects in 2026. But the Trump administration's changes have undermined the major investment for rural areas, Mitchell said.

It often feels like AI is changing everything about the tech business—rewriting the rules of coding, swamping social media with deepfakes, even changing how companies are born. It’s happening so fast that even the most powerful tech firms are pleading helplessness. Google, in particular, has had some success arguing that it’s no longer the titan it was because AI is so quickly blowing up the old power structure of internet search. But the “AI is changing everything” argument may have its limits, as well. And the case unfolding in a Virginia federal court might help establish just where those limits are. The case is the big remedies trial in Google’s advertising antitrust lawsuit. The Justice Department is trying to force the company to spin off at least one of its ad platforms; Google, of course, wants to do no such thing. One notable character in the drama is AI. Judge Leonie Brinkema brought up AI on the trial’s opening day, asking whether the technology was transforming the ad market enough to resolve some of the competition issues in the next two to three years. An ad tech executive responded on the stand that it wouldn’t. Several other DOJ witnesses testified that AI hasn’t significantly changed display advertising, nor Google’s dominance in the area. Google, of course, wants to tell the opposite story—if AI is poised to upend its ad market, the judge will likely take it much easier on the company.