Fast Company

More than 900 complaints that mention SpaceX or its Starlink internet service have been filed with the Federal Communications Commission over the past five years, according to files obtained through a public records request. The complaints provide a view into how the technology has already evolved into a critical lifeline for some rural U.S. residents.

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.

Two companies, ViaPath and Aventiv Technologies, form a duopoly that controls 80 percent of the $1.5 billion prison communications market. These two companies contract with nearly every correctional agency at the state, county, and federal levels, and the size of their kickbacks—money agencies earn from our communications—depends on how willing public officials are to allow price gouging. According to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, one-third of families with an incarcerated relative go into debt

The internet feels like it’s falling apart. To start, nothing seems to work anymore. Google’s search engine once provided directory-level assistance to the denizens of the internet. Now it’s chock full of ads, sidebars, SEO-optimized clickbait, and artificial intelligence-powered guesstimations of possible answers to peoples’ questions. On Amazon, the digital shelves are littered with sponsored products and cheap replicas of popular items. On social media, the situation is even more dire.

In February of 2017, Tom Rutledge, then-CEO of Charter, was asked how changes in Washington were about to impact the company.

The Affordable Connectivity Program is about to run out—and Congress is watching it happen. When the ACP was created in 2021 as part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the $14.2 billion Congress allocated was expected to last five years. But demand for the benefit was so high that in January the Federal Communications Commission announced the program would be winding down at the end of April, after just three years.

AI has become a market imperative for leading American businesses. However, current AI knowledge is largely centered around cities. Meanwhile, in rural America, income inequality has never been higher—nor has the digital divide been more deeply felt.

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program differs from previous federal broadband programs because it promised to allocate the funding to individual states and allow them to figure out the best way to distribute the funds. Once states receive their broadband funding, they still have to set up a mechanism to request proposals from internet service providers, grade the proposals that come in, and o